There Was Once A Knight in Shining Armor...He Died @nainenalina - Tumblr Blog

Thick Skull

I am a magnet for broken pieces. I am attracted to broken people. I pick 'em up and now my fingers are bleeding - And it looks like my fault. And it looks like I'm caught red-handed…

Part One: Told You So

Summary:

You and Ray have been friends for years, and you have come to depend on each other for a lot. That's why you're shocked to find out that he entered The Long Walk without telling you, and he's leaving for the starting line tomorrow. Not only did you think that he despised The Long Walk and everything it stands for, but you thought at the very least that he would warn you sooner. Of course, he knew that you would have tried to talk him out of it, like you're already doing.

All he wants now is a goodbye. But it's not coming in the form of warmth and kisses and sweet nothings like he thought it would. You're not planning on letting go of him with anything less than deep claw marks and screams. You're not the kind of girl who will let him go quietly into the night... and he can't even begin to know what that means. Not just for him, but for the fate of the road he's about to embark on.

Virgin!Ray Garraty x Fem!Reader. Best Friends to Lovers. Emotional Angst, Hurt and Comfort, Smut. Based on the film The Long Walk (2025).

Word Count: 31,300

The Long Walk Masterlist | AO3 Link | Series Masterlist |

Full warnings list and author's notes below the cut.

Warnings: the reader is referred to as a girl or a woman and uses she/her pronouns (though, as with most of my fics, most of the pronouns used are you/yours), and during the sex scene(s), the reader is described as having a vagina and breasts; the reader character’s looks are not described in anyway in terms of hair colour, weight, skin tone, or eye colour; the reader character is described as wearing dresses during her younger years and jeans and tee shirts as she gets older; the reader character as a complex relationship with femininity (I don’t want to say ‘tomboy’, but there is themes surrounding gender roles in the fic); this fic does use the term Y/N, and I highly recommend that you get a word replacer extension for your browser to enhance the reading experience; for reference, in the main timeline/the main part of this fic, Ray and the reader character are both 19 years old - I’m not sure where I read it, but I saw someone say that is how old Ray’s character is supposed to be, in other sections (in the flashbacks) they are 12 or 16, but in the main chunk of the fic (what would be the canon of the film) they are both 19 (if you want more clarification on this ‘timeline’, feel free to ask me); a moment of Ray being slightly sexist at the beginning - it’s a flashback when he’s a child, so it’s a moment guided by immaturity; also there is general tones of sexism due to the source material being themed after the 70s - themes of gender roles (and how people are disliked for breaking them), toxic masculinity, etc.; mentions of Ray being bullied in school as a child (and somewhat into his teenage years), and while most of that bullying is name calling, some of that bullying is physical violence; mentions of the canon character death of Ray’s father; mentions of some disordered eating habits (the reader skips meals often, due to emotions and bad habits rather than body image); Ray and the reader both smoke cigarettes/tobacco; passing mention of the reader smoking weed; the reader does drink alcohol, and she has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and there is a family history of alcoholism (though it’s never specifically called that); there is some discussion of the reader’s family members, but the reader is not related to any canon characters and the reader’s family member’s physical traits are not described - the reader character’s family members are also not given names, so you can fill in those blanks in your head if you like; there is a mention of the reader being able to fit into her father’s old clothes - so sorry if that’s not accurate to your life but the father’s body type is never described so it doesn’t denote the reader’s body type, which is ultimately my goal.

Themes of militarism and military propaganda, in alignment with the original film; a few times ‘The War’ is mentioned, and like the film, I intentionally kept it vague; mentions of ‘marriage laws’ that aren’t in the canon source material (something that I made up) - basically, the idea that young people (especially fertile young women) should get married when they turn 18 in order to increase the birth rate; passing mentions of religion (in the form of Christianity) (I have mentioned that the reader character is not religious); the general horrors and trauma of The Long Walk - mentions of bloody and scarred feet (and other types of physical injuries), mentions of people being forced to shit themselves to survive, mentions of people being shot in the head, mentions of emotional trauma (for participants and spectators), general death, blood, and horror; graphic descriptions of injuries that occur on The Long Walk (the same level of graphic as the film); the reader slaps Ray (not in a sexual way) - not hard enough to permanently injure, just out of shock/anger; mentions of gun violence; the reader points a gun at Ray as a threat (but it’s not loaded); Ray refers to the reader having sex as ‘whoring it out’ (again, gender roles) (and him being petty and jealous); (briefly) the reader having suicidal ideations; Hank x Clementine as a background ship; a couple of slightly homophobic comments from Barkovitch; there is undertones of Pete x Ray (that get increasingly stronger in the second part) because I could not help it, these two have undeniable chemistry, it’s just part of them; for the actual smut scene - while Ray is a virgin (which is something he explicitly states), the reader character is not a virgin, she has had sex with other guys before and has much more experience with sex than Ray does; there are no specifically outlined roles, but the reader is more dominant and Ray is more submissive; slightly dubious consent - the characters are upset about outside things and their relationship is undefined, and they don’t expressly ask consent to have sex with each other, but they very much want it; hair pulling (towards Ray); biting (towards Ray); unprotected penis in vagina sex (Ray glosses over the consequences of unprotected sex in his mind but nothing actually comes of it); the reader spanks Ray on the ass (once); mild choking towards Ray; creampie (Ray cums inside the reader - but there’s no breeding kink); oral - reader receiving; passing mention of masturbation (and Ray having masturbation fantasies about you); I think that is actually it. Please let me know if there are any warnings I missed or anything you would like me to add.

A/N: Fun fact, the very first bit of this is based on my experience in moving from a very large more 'city' type place to a very, very small town (I think the place I lived is technically too small to even be considered a 'town', which is hilarious) - so the whole 'there is no groceries and we're in a split level class' bit isn't even meant to depict the whole Post-War desolate economy, it's a real life experience that I had lmao. Anyway - I hope you all enjoy this intensely unhinged fic I wrote, and I hope you stick around for Part Two later on.

...

Maine was a desolate place.

It was very different from what you were used to, growing up in Washington, DC. You were used to the hustle and bustle of living on a military base, a place that was constantly filled with people and never seemed to shut down, not even at night. You were used to attending a school that had more than thirty kids in one class, and that class not even making up the entire grade level. You were used to your father’s friends - people from his unit coming in and out of your house at all hours. You were used to your home belonging to other people constantly - your father’s unit members and their wives and their children too. You were used to the grocery stores on the base being stocked with the best foods, and your family always being given the best treatment because your father was a high ranking member and you were his special princess.

You had come to hate the quiet. And you only realized that because of how terribly quiet it was in the middle of nowhere fucking Maine.

Now you lived in the middle of nowhere among wheat fields and attended a split grade level class where the teacher was forced to give the same material to sixth and seventh graders all at once in order to make up a ‘full’ school room of a dozen kids. When you went to the store with your mother - a store that was a whole twenty minute drive away from where you lived, most items were out of stock most times, and you ended up eating things out of cans for dinner most nights of the week.

Most people spoke with confident ignorance and were generally insufferable. Most people except for Ray Garraty.

That much you had easily learned in the short year that you had lived in Maine. Well, it would soon be coming up on one year exactly. It was almost the one year anniversary of your father’s death, and while you hated life without him, and still dearly missed him every fucking day; you hated living without your hero, hated living without your favourite person in the world… you had been getting used to it now. The harsh wound was slowly healing over, especially with the help of Ray’s humor and friendship helping you move forward.

And it did help you to think about the fact that your father had died for a good cause. He was still a hero that you could look up to.

These days, you focused on enjoying the little things - the surprising highlights of living in such a boring place. Like the popsicle mold that Ray’s mom had picked up at a secondhand sale and the good Kool Aid mix she put into it to give to you and Ray as a frosty treat. Because even though it was only April, it was quickly becoming hotter outside with each day, the sun beating down on the expanse of nothingness with a particularly brutality - like it was hell bent to cook you all like bugs under a magnifying glass.

You enjoyed the fact that the old play park was only a short walk away from your neighboring houses, and you were now both sitting on the squeaking, slightly rusty old swings as you enjoyed slurping on the popsicles. You enjoyed the easy silence of Ray’s company, liking that he was someone you didn’t have to talk to constantly and it didn’t feel awkward. You enjoyed the bright sun and the light breeze, the sound of it whipping through all the overgrown grass.

You were also looking forward to watching The Long Walk on TV soon, something that was a highlight of your year every single year. You didn’t have a TV in your house (the one you used to have apparently belonged to the military base, so your family hadn’t been allowed to take it when you moved out). But Elsie Fisher, a girl from school, said her family always had a group of people over every year to watch, and you could come.

Her parents always made a big deal about watching it, having snacks, making an event of it, even having a betting pool. You knew that happened on the base sometimes, but it was highly frowned upon when it came to The Long Walk - your father would go on long rants about how people should be ashamed to make bets on something so ‘honorable’, and how it was about pride and ‘the grit of the human spirit’, not about humans being treated like horses.

You had nearly told Elsie that when she had shown you this year’s roster and asked for your bet, but you didn’t want to be kicked out of her party. (Instead, you told her that you didn’t have any money to spare as a bet, and she accepted this answer.)

Ray’s family had a small black and white TV, but he said they didn’t watch The Long Walk. You didn’t know why, though. You wanted to invite him to come to Eslie’s party to watch with you - even though she hadn’t told him specifically to come. He deserved to watch the broadcast too. He deserved to see the boys playing, going through the trial - he deserved to see the hero that would emerge victorious as the winner.

You considered it to be a very transformative experience, and it always filled you with pride and hope when you watched it. Ray deserved to get that experience too. He might end up doing The Walk someday, so he deserved to see how it was done.

“What are you thinking about?” Ray asked, noticing that you hadn’t said anything for a while - which was rare for you.

You were standing on the edge of a tire swing - one that was laid flat and held up by three chains, swaying, spinning yourself in slow circles while you sucked on your popsicle. Ray was sitting still on one of the other single seat swings, squinting up at you through the sun, getting some drops of the bright red juice down his chin and onto his shirt without even noticing.

“If you won The Long Walk - what would you wish for?” You asked, now entirely curious about this.

Both of you were only twelve, so Ray was far off from being the mandatory eighteen in order to enter - but still, you wondered if he ever would. You wondered if he had a wish that would drive him to take up the challenge. It was something you had heard guys talking about on the playground at school before, but he had never bothered to give his two cents to the conversation. You thought it was likely just because he didn’t think much of those guys, and surely, he would have an answer for you.

“I would never enter The Long Walk.” He told you, no hesitation, absolutely firm in this conviction.

This immediately confused you.

Everyone entered The Long Walk.

It wasn’t mandatory, but you hadn’t heard of anybody who hadn’t entered their name at least once. The only people who didn’t enter weren’t medically fit to do so - and sometimes even they tried to sneak past with fake medical forms. Sometimes they succeeded. The only other people you knew who didn’t enter were people who worked with the military, because they weren’t legally eligible to enter a contest run by the military. It was something your father had called ‘a conflict of interest’. They could end up cheating. You had heard so many young men on the base talk about how they were jealous that they couldn’t enter while watching The Long Walk on TV.

“Why not?” You rushed to ask.

“My dad said I should never do it.” He told you, using a tone of palpable insight that he often used with you, talking down to you in a way that he never meant to. You scowled at him. “He says The Major just screws people over-”

“Shut up!” You hissed, leaning over and kicking him lightly in the back with your foot, no real force behind it, causing him to grunt. “You can’t say that about The Major! You’ll get Squadded!”

Your head whipped around frantically in paranoia, as though waiting for someone to pop out with a gun and start shooting. He craned his neck, scanning the area before he sharply rolled his eyes.

“There’s nobody around.” He sighed. “Besides, it’s true.”

“It is not.” You argued, your voice taking on a whiny, petulant tone that irritated Ray to his core.

You were someone so strong, someone so defiant in every other area of life - but when it came time to talk about the military, the precious gods your father had walked among, you so easily repeated back every single piece of garbage they had taught you like it was sacred scripture.

“The Major is a good man, and he deserves respect.” You said, your chest puffing out confidently with these words. “He works hard to run The Long Walk. He does great work in giving young men an opportunity to better their lives and the lives of those around them. Our country would be nothing without him.”

You grinned, quoting something from the handbook practically word for word, having never even read that book before. You had just heard those same words recycled from so many other people, so many times. You had been spoonfed those ideas so many times without even realizing how highly manufactured it all was. You were their princess - their perfect little puppet.

Ray just let out a harsh, irritated sigh and shook his head, knowing it was pointless to argue against you. You were incredibly stubborn and stuck in your ways of thinking. His father had warned him not to corrupt your idea that your father was ‘a hero’, even if it was continually annoying to hear you go spouting off about it. It was something you needed to hold onto in mourning - it was something that you needed to believe.

“But come on, if you did enter, and you won - what would you wish for?” You pressed, still wanting to know his answer.

To you, it was a fun game. It was a theoretical discussion that made you picture him older, slightly sweaty and dirty, being praised by a big crowd at the finish line, people throwing flowers at him while he gave a tired smile of victory and cameras flashed toward him. For some reason, it also made you picture yourself running up to him and kissing him as a part of that victory, him wrapping his arms around you eagerly like you were the best part of the prize. But you pushed that thought away for now.

“Okay, if I entered - which I wouldn’t,” He said, specifically mincing his words. “If I entered, and if somehow I won, I would probably wish for… I dunno, I’d wish for a million popsicles.”

He shrugged, giving the most non-serious answer that he could think of.

At the moment, he could think of nothing so big and tangible that would largely improve his life. His family was poor, and the money would definitely change his life in so many good ways, but the winner also got a lot of money without having to wish for it. But still, he would never enter The Long Walk. His father had warned him that the money wasn’t worth potentially dying over - so he should never enter. He should just try to work hard to earn his own money, even if that seemed difficult or impossible at times.

(In the back of his mind, he considered wishing that you would have to stay with him forever. Wishing that you would have to marry him and you would never get to leave. But he figured you wouldn’t like that, just like you didn’t like him disagreeing with you about The Major.)

“If you won, you’d be rich.” You reminded him. “The winner gets like - a gazillion dollars. You could just buy a million popsicles. That’s a dumb wish.”

Maybe that’s why he wanted to wish for you. Because you thought he was dumb, and the second you got the chance - you would leave him. He had dreams where he chained you to him and jumped to the bottom of the ocean, and when you both sunk to the bottom, you smiled at him. But he knew that life wasn’t like that.

He shrugged. “Well, I guess I’m dumb.”

“I would enter but - they don’t let girls in.” You sighed, sounding mournful over it. “Why do you think that is?”

The words dangled dangerously on his tongue:

‘Because girls are weaker.’

Instead of speaking, he sucked on his melting popsicle, knowing that it would be dangerous to say it. You probably would have punched him hard enough to leave a bruise just to prove the words wrong.

He thought about one of your first days attending his school, when one of the boys said that girls were all sissy crybabies because he had seen you shedding tears over the thought of your father, and in response, you had pinned him to the ground and pulled out several chunks of his hair and left a knee-sized bruise in his back getting him to eat dirt. Nobody reported it to a teacher because they were all too afraid to admit that they were scared of a girl.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Probably just cause it started with guys and they never thought to put girls in too.”

You nodded, seeming satisfied with this answer.

Ray did feel a sense of relief at the thought - the idea that girls weren’t allowed. You loved The Long Walk, and he knew that if you could have, you would have entered as soon as you turned eighteen. And you would have entered as many times as it took for you to be chosen. You would have been their proud, enthusiastic poster child if you were a boy.

So, knowing that it was all purely theoretical, he decided to play into your game.

“What would you wish for if you won?” He asked you.

“Two million popsicles.” You grinned, proud to one-up his answer. He let out a small laugh, shaking his head, and then you added on more seriously: “Maybe I’d wish for The Long Walk to include girls too.”

“Okay, now that’s dumb.” Ray scolded you. “Cause if they included girls, then you would already be there. Your wish would be useless.”

“Maybe I’ll dress up as a boy and sneak in.” You shrugged, sounding entirely too pleased with yourself as this came to mind.

Ray felt a sharp pain through his stomach, like he had been punched. He hoped that you were joking, and he hated the thoughtful look that came across your face - like you were truly deciphering this as a plan that could be put into action.

“I don’t think The Major would like that.” He said, quickly trying to flush this idea out of your head with your own logic. “Besides - you’re way too pretty to ever pass as a boy. Nobody would believe you.”

Before you could linger on this comment and how warm it made you feel, someone shouted across the playground, calling out to the two of you.

“Well look! It’s Gallon Sized Garraty and his little military wife!”

It was a group of boys from school who regularly bothered Ray, and by extension, now regularly bothered you. You could barely be bothered to remember their names. Bobby, Johnny, and something else stupid. Eddie? Who knows…

Bobby, the ring-leader type was grinning widely at his supposedly clever insult while the others laughed in his ear and high-fived him over it, and you couldn’t keep your mouth shut, now highly annoyed by their presence. Though Ray had warned you several times in the past ‘not to engage’.

“Hey idiot, a gallon isn’t even that big! Especially not compared to a person!” You shouted back. “You’re not even clever!”

“Okay, well your boyfriend is still a fucking fatass!” He shouted back with a glare, obviously hating being corrected by you.

You didn’t bother to correct him about Ray not being your ‘boyfriend’ - too annoyed by his general mouth-breathing to care.

You didn’t hesitate to hop down off the swing, and when you charged a few steps over to him, Ray shouted after you, his voice ripe with worry, trying to stop you.

“Y/N-!”

But it was too late - you were already heaving your arm back and letting loose, throwing your half-melted, half-eaten popsicle at him, causing a mess of bright red, cold juice and mush to splatter all over his face and his shirt. You found yourself satisfied that it looked like blood.

“Ew!” He screamed. His lackeys laughed, and he glared at them. “I’m gonna fucking kill you, you little bitch!”

“Oooh, I’m so scared.” You taunted him, giving a very obviously fake and exaggerated shiver of fear before you let out a mocking laugh. “What are you gonna do - strangle me with your bra?”

His lackeys let out another round of laughter at this, and he became even more flustered, and even more angry because of it.

“I’ll bash your head in with a fucking rock and dump your body in the woods! It’s not like your dead daddy’s here to protect you!”

With this comment, you made a vicious charge toward him, your hands outstretched like claws and ready to kill. But before you could get any closer, someone taller and stronger than you - someone who definitely wasn’t Ray, wrapped an arm around your waist and held you back, using your own energy to spin you back around toward the swingset, away from Bobby.

“Alright, that’s enough.”

When the oddly calm voice grunted boredly in your ear, you heaved out a sigh of frustration. It was your older brother.

“Seriously?!” You cried out at him, crossing your arms, intentionally leaning past him to give the bullies a sharp glare. They were all laughing at you now, laughing at how easily you had been stopped. (Little did they know that the only reason you hadn’t fought him harder was because you had no desire to stop him - you didn’t want to hurt him with anger you had built up against someone else.) “Those fuckers deserve it-!”

“Language.” He told you sharply. “If Dad heard you talking like that, he’d make you hold your tongue for an hour.”

You wanted to make a comment about how your dad was no longer around, but you didn’t want your brother to make you hold your tongue just to prove a point. It was a punishment in which you were forced to stand with your tongue between your two fingers, something gross and uncomfortable to remind you of the consequences of ‘not thinking before you speak’. So instead, you rolled your eyes, and remained silent.

Your brother then turned to the boys.

“Everett, looks like that bike chain is broken,” He said, nodding toward the pile of bikes that the bullies had dropped.

Everett? Is that what the fucker’s name was?

The specific boy nodded slowly.

“You can bring it by our place anytime and I’ll fix it up for you. Number seventeen, the one with the blue door, you know it, right?” He nodded again, and your brother smiled. “I can probably fill the tires for you, too.”

“Uh… thanks.” Everett said, entirely awkward, clearly unsure how to handle being greeted with a favour after he had nearly cheered on someone getting into a fight with you.

“Seriously?!” You shrieked out, appalled by this.

Rather than responding, your brother then gently guided you by the shoulders, beginning to walk away, and Ray naturally followed.

“Come on, it’s time for dinner.” He told you.

“What was that?” You gaped. “You offered to fix the guy’s stupid bike-”

“Sometimes you have to kill ‘em with kindness.” Your brother told you, clearly still smiling even though you couldn’t see his face. “Something I’m sure you’d know all about, brat.”

He emphasized the nickname - something he started calling you when you were much younger and the two of you used to fight much more, now a symbol of the fact that the one of the only people in the world you truly got along with was him. He was one of the only people you let get away with calling you names.

You rolled your eyes sharply again.

“Yeah. With kindness.” You snorted, bitterness clear in your voice.

That park had been torn down since then, and sometimes Ray walked past the old patches of grass that hadn’t grown back, and he thought about your brother. He thought about someone who wanted to kill the world with kindness - and he wondered what that world would have looked like. But he knew it could never be possible.

…

Ray sat on the porch waiting for you.

Somehow, this had become the most concrete part of his day, the thing that anchored him to the earth better than his mother’s cooking and the way she cried late at night when she thought he had fallen asleep and couldn’t hear through the thin, drafty old walls of the house. Though Ray had so many other routine aspects to his life, this one had become the one that he clung onto the most in order to keep him sane.

Every single day, without fail, when you got off your shift at the cannery, you would come home, wash up, change your clothes, and you would skip dinner to instead spend the evening sitting on the porch with Ray while the two of you weaned a stale old cigarette from a pack that you had bartered with someone to get.

Despite Ray’s attempts to try to get you to eat, sometimes waiting with a plate of ‘leftovers’ that his mother had sent him with still dutifully hot in his lap, wrapped up in tinfoil for you, you claimed that you weren’t interested in food after such a long day - something you said with increasing frequency these days. Sometimes you would pick at the food Ray had brought you if he truly nagged about it, other times you would come with a bottle of drink in hand, proclaiming that it was a good day because you had gotten your hands on ‘something special’.

Ray liked the feeling of going to bed fuzzy-headed and numb from the liquor. He liked the almost magical quality of the liquid, and how it made him forget about his problems for a while. But he knew that he shouldn’t like the feeling. He had seen what had happened to your mother, and he knew that he should be more afraid to end up like that.

You were running a bit late tonight. Which didn’t entirely surprise Ray, but still - it worried him.

Usually you were home when the sun was still bright, long before the last buses stopped running, having plenty of time to spare before the county-wide mandated curfew. But with increasing frequency these days, you were coming home later - having to sneak around the military patrols that happened every night around curfew, risking getting caught, risking getting fined for being out past curfew, risking being thrown in jail.

Sometimes you didn’t come home at all at night, and Ray felt like a stupid worrying hen, up all night, peeking through his bedroom window every five minutes to see if the light had turned on in yours across the way. He felt like an idiot, losing out on sleep, waiting for some signal that you were home safe while his brain ran wild about all the ways that you could have been dead, dying, or hurt.

Even now, Ray sat on the edge of the porch, huddled on the edge of the short three steps, his hands grasping his knees - and he hated the worry that started to overtake him. He hated that he was so used to taking care of you.

Ray had known you since the two of you were young - you, your mother, and your brother had moved from DC to this much more isolated community in Maine when you were just eleven years old. Your father’s death was still so fresh when your family had been uprooted and your whole life had been changed.

He had been a very high ranking member of the military, and at that age, you had not been shy about boasting that he died as a war hero. You proudly wore one of his medals as a necklace - though Ray noticed that in the past few years, it had been allocated to a small metal tin that used to hold dried oats that you now used as a keepsake box. And now, you didn’t boast about your father the way that you used to. You didn’t speak about him unless prompted by someone else.

Your mother had originally been the one working in the cannery when your family first moved here. But it wasn’t long before her spiraling grief over your father meant that she stopped showing up to work, and your brother quit school to take over providing for your family. You looked up to your brother with just as much shine as you had your father, and you took every available opportunity to praise him when you could.

When you first moved in, Ray’s mother insisted him over with an offering of her freshly made oatmeal raisin cookies, and the two of you became fast friends. He was the first one you knew at the small, local school, and - loud and mouthy as you were - you were the only one who didn’t call him ‘Giant Gut Garraty’ or other such names, and you spoke out against others for making fun of him.

He couldn’t put into words how grateful he was that not too long after your arrival, the bullying stopped, at least when you were around. Most of the boys in school were more than terrified to admit that they were afraid of you. Of course, this meant that Ray was rattled twice as hard for ‘keeping a girl as his body guard’ when you weren’t around - but those times were rare.

The two of you spend every single day together - did homework together, spent weekends exploring the woods together, played board games together, read books together. There were few waking moments in your lives that you didn’t spend together, being naively happy. You and Ray were always side by side, no matter what.

In his mind’s eye, Ray could still remember it - the two of you happy and laughing as kids. But it felt too long ago to truly see. Too long ago to be real somehow. There was only the two of you now. Two ghosts of those happy kids. Only the porch, only one cigarette, only the breath in which the smoke lasted until it disappeared those few feet up into the air.

He could say that the two of you bonded by proximity or convenience, but he knew that truly, you wouldn’t have stuck so close together if it wasn’t also love. Whether it was completely platonic or some idiotic wandering into the romantic that would be a terrible, heart-breaking mistake - Ray Garraty loved you. And he knew that you wouldn’t keep coming back to sit on this godforsaken porch every single night if you didn’t love him too.

Maybe that’s why he worried more and more when you didn’t show up. Not because he was worried that you had died or gotten hurt - because he knew that you could hold your own. Any man coming at you with ill intentions had no clue what kind of hell he was in for. But he was growing more worried that… truly, you didn’t love him in return. He was worried that you wouldn’t have sat in the darkness and waited for him if the roles were reversed.

It was only in the past two or three years that you and Ray started to drift apart.

And the whole time, he had been fighting like hell to hold onto you - trying his best to keep taking care of you, trying to stay in your life.

But he knew exactly what had happened. He knew what had caused the grand cosmic shift.

When you were sixteen, when your brother was freshly eighteen and had truly become ‘the man of the house’, it was up to him to decide what would become of you when you turned eighteen in just a few short years. It was a fitful, fateful time for young women - you would either be assigned a back-breaking work duty or be assigned a husband by marriage laws, something that the government had instituted to try and increase birth rates. However, it could lead to you being shipped halfway across the country, never to return, being forced to spend your life with a total stranger that you had never met before.

So in the face of this, trying to pick the best possible option for his family - your brother signed up for The Long Walk. At the time, when you were both still so young, Ray had considered proposing to you himself. But he knew it was a stupid idea, and he knew that - as headstrong as you were, you would never accept a proposal from him with the idea that it didn’t come from a place of genuine love. Not that he didn’t love you… But you would never want to be ‘saved’ by him - not like that.

So your brother, at the tender age of eighteen, so fresh faced and young, became a lucky qualifier for The Long Walk. Because he was born in DC, he got an extra entry - one as the home state walker, and one as the shiny militant boy from the capital. And naturally, someone pulled some strings to make sure that he got his time in the spotlight. Before he could blink, they outfitted him with all the best gear - stuff he never could have paid for himself, and they gave him an insight of the upcoming month’s weather report, some extra dry rations, and a map of the route. The same route that was taken every year, of course. But he would get a preview of the terrain - including that hellish steep hill that took out at least half a dozen boys every single year.

The people running the whole thing were lucky. They had a perfect winner on their hands. Someone who would look so great on all the pamphlets, someone they could make a great promo movie out of. Someone they could get to smile at the finish line without hesitation, someone who would stand tall and pose next to The Major with no disdain in his heart. Someone who would wish for something grand, but tangible and practical - like a big house for his family to live in, or a kind, loving husband for his sister. (They kept impressing this upon him when he said that he wasn’t sure of his wish, hoping to get a kind of ‘royal wedding’ out of it too, something they could get another broadcast out of.) They had already printed posters with his face on them, said that they loved ‘his look’. He took after your father - a real hero in the making. (They kept calling him ‘a rabbit’, and you had no clue why.)

And while Ray watched on from his kitchen window, wickedly curious about all the military personnel weaving in and out of your house, you were promised a shining light at the end of the tunnel. After a few rough years with your father gone, the military had finally come to rescue you, being the heroes that you always knew they were. They promised you a great life filled with any luxury you could want, anything money could pay for - not a single worry in the world.

When you bragged about this to Ray, he couldn’t help but to think that he would be left behind and you would never have to think about him again. You were finally leaving him like he had always feared. But you were so happy, and he couldn’t take that from you.

All you would have to do was sit and wait for your brother to win The Long Walk. It would be easy - it was practically guaranteed. They even brought in a brand new twenty-five inch color television for you and your mother to watch the broadcast on, and Ray and his parents sat and joined you and your mother for it.

When he fell nearly right out of the starting gate, your heart stilled in your chest. You hid behind Ray, bracing for a horror you were told you would never have to see. But he barely had time to get his first warning before he rushed back up again, and he laughed it off. For the next two hundred miles, he didn’t pick up another warning. Not one. He was strong, and steady.

It was that strength that caused you to put all your faith in him, believing that winning would be so easy for him. It was that strength that had you smiling brightly and humming joyfully as you got ready on the morning of the third day, getting ready to stand on the sidewalk in Freeport so that you could wave at your brother and toss a bag of his favourite hard caramel candies at him. You were nothing but excited to see him, joyful that you could give him the extra boost he needed in order to win.

Because he was going to win - you were sure of it.

…

“How do I look?” You asked, turning to Ray.

You, your mother, Ray, and Ray’s parents had come to watch. Large crowds weren’t allowed to gather yet, not until there were just two Walkers left. But you were all ‘family’, and the local cop guarding the route hadn’t questioned it when the five of you had piled out of the car to stand on the sidewalk, so it seemed to be okay.

You were wearing one of your best dresses - one you would have worn to church back on the base. But your mother hadn’t gone to church since moving to this new place, or made you go, which did surprise you. Your father had been big on going to church, and your brother still read the bible regularly - he even took one with him in his backpack when he left for The Walk. You had never been big on religion - too many rules for your liking, too much nitpicking (so much arbitrary mess about who was and wasn’t a good person when you found that you could decide for yourself). But that was far aside from the point.

You had grown quite a bit since your church going days, so Mrs. Garraty had used her sewing machine to add a couple of fabric panels to the sides of the dress and one to the hem to lengthen it in order to make it fit better, and though the fabric didn’t match, it looked like an intentionally styled choice. Especially with the use of the thin brown belt that you had added on, and the old new brown leather heeled shoes you were wearing from a secondhand store in town, purchased specifically for this occasion.

Ray reached out and straightened the stiff, well starched (thanks to his mother) white collar of the dress, pressing it down to the back of your neck - you had been fiddling with it so much in the car due to your nerves that it was all out of sorts. He noted in his mind that you did look beautiful, but he wondered why you had dressed up so much for this - he wondered why his mother had made him dress up so much for this. His own starched button up and old, slightly too tight ‘nice occasion’ shoes were definitely bothering him.

“He’s your brother - why would he care what you look like?” Ray posed. “I’ve seen him pick bugs out of your hair before.”

He was pointing out the obvious, of course. Your brother had seen you muddy from playing outside and covered in your own vomit while sick. You had never sought to impress him before - so why did you seem so antsy now?

“Yeah, but there’s gonna be TV cameras.” You replied, nervously smoothing down the bottom of your dress.

Oh. You weren’t worried about impressing your brother, you were worried about the presence of The Long Walk itself - as though you could impress the concept of the race, as though you needed to be as shiny as possible for The Powers That Be.

“They’re not gonna be pointed at you.” Ray let out a scoff of a laugh, trying to let you know how ridiculous you were being. You frowned at him, and he realized how harsh it sounded - as though he was mocking you, as though you weren’t worth filming, and he tried to recover. “They’re focused on the Walkers. That’s what people are watching TV for, right?”

‘They want a stupid death race. Not pretty girls waiting on the sidewalk.’ Ray thought pitifully.

You nodded, and let out a simpering, nervous breath.

“Still, I’m the sister of the winner. Somebody might wanna interview me.” You said, giving him a cheesy grin, and striking a proud pose.

It was like any other time - like the two of you were just joking around in the backyard while hunting snails with big rocks. You were so confident in your words. You were so damn happy on such a dark day.

And he didn’t have the stomach to tell you that you might be wrong.

Your brother wasn’t ‘the winner’. Not yet, at least. And it wasn’t even guaranteed that he would be the winner in the end. But again, Ray had to choose his words carefully to avoid hurting you.

“Nobody is going to interview you,” He chuckled, trying to sound soft and joking, trying to hide the hurt he was concealing for you, the terror he held deep in his heart for you if your brother did not win. “We’re gonna watch your brother pass, say hi, and then we’re going home. But yeah - you look fine. You look great.”

You smiled at this, holding your head high.

“Do you think The Major’s gonna be here?” You asked, eager and bright.

Ray deeply resisted the urge to roll his eyes.

‘He’s not gonna take you onto the truck and fuck you.’ He thought bitterly. He bit his tongue - hating how cynical it would have sounded. He hated how you talked about The Major, like he was some god-like figure to be admired, like he could do no wrong. But now wasn’t the time to get into an argument with you about it.

“Why don’t you go see if you can spot them?” He said, motioning for you to peek out.

He didn’t intend for you to wander into the middle of the street, and he was just glad that you were innocent looking and pretty and that the guards standing by didn’t shoot you on sight for it.

“What’s she gonna do if he doesn’t show up?” Ray’s father asked in a hushed whisper, his voice dull and grinding.

“William, don’t-” Ray’s mother scolded him.

“I’m just saying, we haven’t had our eyes on the broadcast in - what? More than an hour. A lot can happen in an hour.” He huffed, checking his watch. “What are we gonna do if he doesn’t show up with them?”

“I’ll handle it.” Ray said quietly.

Both of his parents gave him an odd look, as though they hadn’t even realized he had been listening. They didn’t know that he had been preparing himself to deal with this situation from the moment your brother left your front door, waving goodbye to you. With your brother gone, taking care of you was Ray’s job now. And further proving that point - your mother didn’t say a word, standing a few feet down, clearly having heard them. Instead, she took a bottle out of her jacket pocket and took a sharp swig.

“Oh, it’s them!” You cheered as you saw figures far off down the road, and Ray stepped out and grabbed you by the wrist, having to use a bit of force to pull you back onto the sidewalk while you kept craning your head desperately to see.

It wasn’t long before the trucks guiding the motorcade pulled up, and a horribly shocking sight followed.

A string of stumbling, half dead, filthy boys. Maybe half a dozen of them at this point, whittled down from the fifty that they had started out with. They were zombies - half alive, barely keeping pace. One of them was leaving a trail of bloody footprints, his feet making horrible wet squelches on the pavement as he went - his shoes were long gone, and it seemed like his socks were nothing more than a mush of threads blended into the horrible mess of blood under his feet now. Somehow his face was stony and firm and he was completely silent, not letting out a single sign of being in pain as he stared ahead with an entirely dead expression on his face, marching forward.

One of the boys was crying, muttering quiet words that couldn’t be discerned. His eyes were wide and the tear tracks on his face were cutting through rough dirt and grime, and his shirt was covered in blood - dry and rusting, clearly someone else’s.

One of the boys was wearing pants that were visibly soiled on the back, walking with a gait of true discomfort because of it, distanced from the others, likely due to the smell. Up until now, it had never even occurred to Ray that The Walk did not stop - not even for bathroom breaks.

One of the boys appeared to be missing half his face - bright pink, raw flesh exposed on one side, as though he had been scraped across the pavement and gotten back up somehow. His lips were partially gone, revealing teeth to the air in places they should not have been seen, the flesh grey in some places, seemingly rotting from being untreated after the injury.

Those were the ones worse off, but still - they were all tired, all filthy, all clearly exhausted and mentally absent because of it.

The sights, the smells, things he never could have imagined, even in the darkest corners of his own mind - it made Ray want to vomit. It was nothing like on TV. Ray was utterly horrified.

During the broadcast, they cut away from horrible things happening, they cut angles so it didn’t show things like bloody feet and shit soiled pants and raw, scraped up, fleshy faces. How the fuck could they keep this from people? Somehow, they managed to use the broadcast as a highlight reel of brotherhood - boys sharing things, smiling, laughing, joking. And when they weren’t - it was glory shots of them marching forward with determination, showing their toughness, showing how real men moved forward to go after the things they wanted in life.

Then - there was your brother. Rounding out the pack, and looking no better than anybody else. The quality of the television broadcast had hid so many of the sins. Where he had just looked dirty and tired on TV… he looked downright dead in person.

You cheered your brother’s name and clapped, but nobody else in the group joined you. Ray was shocked that you still found the ability to cheer happily - but he guessed that was the entire reason you came, wasn’t it? Even if you were faking happiness, you had come to cheer your brother on. You had to put up a good front for him.

When your brother looked over his shoulder at the group and gave a smile, Ray knew in an instant that something was wrong. His eyes were sunken and sickly, his face seemed lifeless, his lips were cracked and chapped in a horrible way. There were dried red scabs rimming his nose, as though he had been having nosebleeds, and his hair was soaked - though it hadn’t been raining. He was drenched in sweat, his shirt also showing evidence of it, much more so than any of the other terrible-off Walkers.

He let out a horrible cough, and when he raised his hand to give a wave, the grossly discoloured veins running up his arm were undeniable as his shirt sleeve rode up.

“I love you!” You cheered. “You’re gonna fuckin’ win it all!”

“Stop swearing!” He yelled back, still determinedly stuck on this. “But I love you too!”

And then - he gave another horrible, deep cough.

You balanced right on the edge of the sidewalk and tossed a small bag you had been holding - a bag of candy that Ray had advised you not to throw.

Your brother stumbled slightly, and caught it.

“Warning, Warning 49! First Warning!”

Somehow, he recovered so quickly, and gave an intensely bright smile that lit up his dead face when he saw what you had given him.

“You could have warned me, brat!” He called out to you.

By now, you were jogging swiftly on the sidewalk to keep up with them, and Ray was right behind you, trying to keep up. He would have to pull you back eventually so that you didn’t jaunt halfway across Maine in the worst possible shoes trying to follow your brother. So that you didn’t end up seeing something you would never recover from.

“Where’s the fun in that?” You called back with a grin.

Your brother opened the bag and immediately began offering the candy around to the other Walkers before he took some for himself, and there were smiles and some other small cheers.

Some chatter could be heard among the Walkers.

“Dude, you got presents?”

“You’re actually sharing?”

“Your sister is hot!”

“Shut up, Mikey! Don’t make me push you.”

“It’s all empty threats with this guy. He’s too nice.”

“Yeah, but you can’t talk like that about a guy’s sister, man-”

“If he doesn’t push you, I will, shitstain.”

Your brother let out a string of harsh coughs, cutting through the chatter, and you had to ask that dreadful question.

“Are you okay?” Your voice warbled with worry for the first time, and Ray’s stomach twisted.

“I’m fine! I’ll see you at home!” He yelled back. “Take care of Mom while I’m gone, brat!”

He gave you another smile over his shoulder and Ray stopped you at the end of the intersection, tugging gently on your elbow to get you to stop walking. You stared on, keeping your eyes focused on the Walkers, focused on him. Ray didn’t pull you back to the car yet, because he knew that you would be determined to watch your brother disappear over the horizon, as far as you could watch him go.

He was now laughing with the other boys as they ate the candies, and the boy who had been crying seemed better off. So something good had come of this. That was the most Ray could have hoped for, right?

“Did he seem okay to you?” You asked, an unsure tone creeping into your voice for the first time ever in the years that Ray had known you.

“He looked fine.” He told you, lying as boldly as he ever had. “He looked good. He’s strong. He’ll be okay.”

The only thing Ray could hope then was that the other boys would fade quicker than your brother did - quickly enough for him to get to a hospital in time to be saved. He hoped that they had some treatment for whatever was wrong with him.

And then, as if a cruel god was intentionally listening, willing Ray to believe in dread rather than hope - his prayer was answered in a blink.

“Warning, Warning 7! Second Warning!”

“I can’t do it! I can’t do it no more!”

It was the most anguish filled cry that Ray had ever heard in his life. It was a harsher pain in his gut than when Bobby and Everett had pinned Ray down and punched him as many times as they could, citing that him having ‘more cushioning’ meant that it wouldn’t hurt.

The boy who had shit himself was now crawling on his hands and knees, his mouth open wide as he bawled.

“I wanna go home! I want my Mama! Please!”

One of the men got off the slow moving truck and slid a gun off his shoulder, lining it up with the boy’s head as he wept. A move so entirely cold, uncaring. It was so jarring to watch.

Ray grabbed your arm bruise-tight and whipped you back around to face him, forcing your face into his chest with a hand tight on the back of your head. You immediately squirmed, trying to push him away, and somehow - he found more strength than he ever had in his life to hold you.

“Ray! Ray, what’s happening?!” You cried, wiggling in his grasp.

Ray’s chest tightened when he noticed your brother running back toward the boy.

“Warning, Warning 49! Second Warning!”

“Come on, come on! You gotta get up! Get up! We can still do it! We can still make it!” Your brother yelled at him, trying to encourage him, grabbing him by the arm and trying to drag him up.

“I wanna go home!” The boy sobbed. “I just wanna go home!”

“Ray, what’s happening?!” You screamed again, adding to the chaos. He held you as tightly as he could, determined not to let you look.

“Warning, Warning 7! Final Warning!”

“Get the fuck up!” Your brother cried out, his voice scraping his throat with intense, ripping desperation.

It was the first time you had ever heard him swear. He had always been so deeply against ‘foul language’ because your father had been.

The man put his finger on the trigger of the gun, and Ray’s stomach nearly exploded.

“Go!” He screamed at your brother. “Fucking go! You can’t do this in front of her!”

Your brother gave you a mournful look, his eyes flickering from the crying boy toward the back of your head, and then, hesitantly, he turned his back and ran forward to catch up with the other Walkers.

A gunshot rang out, and you flinched against Ray’s chest and began sobbing.

“Ray, please-” You choked out, your hands digging into his once pristine shirt, wrinkling it intensely as you couldn’t bear to look on your own.

“It wasn’t him.” He assured you. “He tried to help, but-”

“Fucking of course he did. He - he always needs to help.”

You forcefully pulled yourself away from Ray, stepping out into the road once again - something that made his already upset stomach churn harder and made him feel lucky that nobody went after you. You only stopped to stand still once you got visual confirmation that your brother was alive and well.

And then - your eyes lingered on the body of that poor boy for a long time.

It felt like hours later when Ray finally managed to peel you out of the street.

Of course, something changed in you that day. You used to believe that The Long Walk was all about glory. You had been blind to the death and horror of it all. But that was the intention behind the broadcasts, after all.

Somehow, even after crying all the way home - you still believed that you would be meeting your brother at the finish line.

…

It was such a small cut on his hand.

He probably hadn’t even noticed it at first.

When his hand started to swell up, and turn red, and then purple, and then putrid black - he hid it well. He used the scarf that Ray’s mother had knitted him to wrap it up, and with the long sleeves of his shirt covering his arms, nobody saw the terrible purpling veins going up his arm - the signs of infection making its way through his blood, slowly killing him. It was easy to write off the dark circles under his eyes as tiredness, exhaustion from walking for days on end without sleep. It was easy to say that his hair was drenched with sweat from the effort, rather than from a deadly fever.

It was such a small cut. A random, seemingly harmless fall on an old metal bridge, the instinct of his arms out front to catch himself. An old bridge that just happened to be unmaintained and rusting.

With medical intervention, the survival rate for tetanus is about ninety percent. Without treatment, the mortality rate is about one in four.

Ironic that there were four walkers left when your brother truly saw the worst of it. His muscles started to spasm, his breath struggling through his lips in harsh wheezes as he fought for every last bit of air. He stumbled on the road in front of the other boys, and as much as he tried to fight it, telling himself that he could keep going as he became dizzy from the lack of oxygen - eventually, he collapsed to the ground.

“Warning, Warning 49! Final Warning!”

In his final moments of life, your brother was hunched on his hands and knees on some dark back road, far from his family, his face horrifically discoloured, his eyes bulging as his lungs burned, yearning for a breath. But still, a gun was carelessly shoved in his face as the screen cut to a much shinier photo of him, one that had been taken weeks before when he had been much more lively, and the announcement of his elimination from the competition played.

There is no prize for fourth place.

You rushed out of the room in tears, utterly hysterical, and Ray had to chase you on and on through the sprawling grass behind your houses before he finally caught up to you and swept you into a hug. The two of you collapsed to the ground, and you cried into his chest until the sun set, unable to move him, and him unwilling to force you anywhere when you were so fragile.

Strangely - the two of you never talked about it. You never spoke about your brother’s death with him, never tried to process it in any other way than crying while he held you. It was a specter of a presence that you refused to acknowledge.

It wasn’t long after that day that you stopped wearing your father’s medal, and then, in a blink - you started changing so much more. You picked up smoking and drinking, you started wearing heavy make-up and jeans. Seemingly just because you knew that most government pamphlets mandated that women wear skirts for jobs, and while there were no specific laws against women wearing pants, you seemingly wore them more in your spare time just to spite the feminine uniform you had to wear during the day.

He knew that your brother’s death had affected you in such a harsh, terrible way - but he hated that you never talked about it. Any attempts that he made to force a conversation about it had you changing the subject or simply walking away from him. And while it was clear that you fully acknowledged that your brother was dead, clearly not delusional in believing that he was still out there somewhere, often quipping back at Ray with things like ‘he’s gone’ or ‘he died, why do we need to talk about him?’ - it was clear that you hadn’t truly taken the time to process it. You had refused to believe that The Long Walk might kill him, and when it did, you never acknowledged the huge hole that it caused in your life.

You simply became a different person. One who hid things from Ray. One who came home late or not at all. One who needed cigarettes and booze to survive. One so much different than the girl who stood on the sidewalk that day, cheering her brother on with a bright smile on her face.

And of course, it was just then that you strolled in, proving Ray’s point.

He was never sure why you rushed to change your clothes after work. Yes, your work uniform wasn’t pretty, but he never got the sense that you were someone who cared too much about your looks. When your mother used to scold you for getting mud on and ripping holes in your nice dresses, you used to laugh at her and shrug it off.

He could only suspect that you dressed up more lately because you snuck out after dark, even though he wasn’t entirely sure where you went. That part bothered him. He had been tempted to follow you at times, but he had never been brave enough to actually follow through. You joked to him that you went to underground rock concerts - and sometimes you came back smelling like weed, and that worried him more.

Yes, he wasn’t officially your keeper and he couldn’t stop you from breaking laws - not unless he locked you up somewhere. And he had definitely thought about that, and then realized how insane it sounded and shook the thought off. It would break him to see you arrested or hell - even gunned down in the street like his father had been, just to prove some damn point. He knew you would be stubborn enough to stand up and accept a gun in the face rather than putting your head down and sucking The Major’s balls for everyone to see.

Making that point especially clear, on this evening, in addition to your usual wide-legging jeans that were far too tight around your hips and thighs, and your usual beat-up old sneakers with black marker all over the toes and soles (some of which Ray had put there with your permission when your legs had been dangled over his lap), you were wearing intensely thick, dark eyeliner and an old white tee shirt with the sleeves cut off that you had defaced with a black marker. It had some stars drawn on it, and a large caption on the front that said FUCK THE MAJOR in bold, messy letters.

It made Ray’s stomach twist with anxiety. (Which harshly battled with attraction and a twinge of lust because he could see your nipples poking through the fabric and he could see the natural teardrop shape of your breasts because you weren’t wearing a bra underneath, perfectly complimenting the little bit of your soft stomach that stuck out from the bottom of your shirt above the very low rise of your jeans.) If you were caught wearing something like that, something with those words on it, you would have been arrested without hesitation. You were becoming far, far too bold.

Maybe he did have a twinge of nostalgia for the days when you wore flowery dresses and white stockings - days when you giggled and smiled more. Days when he never noticed your figure and he certainly never would have thought about peeling those jeans off you to see what was underneath. He loved you now, he always would love you, but - he wanted to go back. He missed the simplicity of those days.

“What the fuck is that?” Ray asked, his voice harsh and accusing as you came to sit beside him, naturally heaving yourself right down beside him on the porch steps without a second thought.

“What?” You shrugged, trying to play dumb.

You reached over to the breast pocket of his button up shirt where you knew the cigarette and lighter would be waiting, dug up from the loose floorboard of his bedroom floor where he kept a stash of your important things and his own. Both of you knew that if you tried to keep your own cigarettes at your place, your mother would have found them and puffed them all away within a week.

He batted your hand away, hoping that he would be able to convince you to go home and change before the two of you settled into your nightly routine, knowing that it would likely be futile. He hoped that he would actually be able to enjoy this night with you - even though the sun was quickly turning the sky orange and there wasn’t much of it left to enjoy before you both had to get home when curfew hit. (He hoped that you would actually go home for curfew and stay there.)

He just wanted to spend some time with you. He just wanted to enjoy you. He didn’t need your shirt being spotted by someone. He didn’t need you being hauled off in handcuffs. He didn’t need to be worrying about you when he had so much already on his plate.

“What the fuck are you wearing?” He clarified, though you both already knew what he was talking about. “Go change.”

You let out a scoff and rolled your eyes, and his insides soured. He knew what was coming.

“No.” You snarled, entirely confident, not even giving it a second thought. Ray rolled his eyes, and you shook your head. “You’re not my fucking father.” You fired back easily. “Unless you wanna become some militant, scum-sucking pig-”

“Says you, who used to call him a hero.” Ray argued. He found it ironic that you now so easily fired off such horrible names toward the military, when they used to be such precious heroes in your eyes.

Your face fell, and he wasn’t surprised when you shifted the subject.

“I’m just saying, you have no right to dictate what I wear. And I wouldn’t expect you to be so fascist about it.” You told him, your voice quieter now. “I’m off the clock, and I can wear whatever I want now.”

You groped for Ray’s breast pocket again, the minimal bit of contact unintentionally making him warm as your fingers successfully captured the cigarette and the lighter this time. He became too weak and dumb to stop you a second time as a whole body tingle set in, and you flashed a victorious smirk as you brought the cigarette up to your lips and sparked the lighter. He had to push down thoughts about how long it had been since the last time the two of you hugged as he tried to navigate his way back toward the point. He tried not to be jealous of that tobacco being squeezed so dutifully between the plumpness of your lips and sucked on.

He told himself that he wasn’t pathetic and ultimately weak in the wake of you.

“Yeah but you can’t wear that.” He pressed, gesturing toward your shirt. “No matter what fuckin’ clock you’re on.”

You exhaled a harsh puff of smoke, shaking your head as you extended the cigarette out to him. And still, as annoyed as he was with you, he took it. He knew that he could likely use the calming effect right now. He took a greedy lungful, getting too dizzy waiting for your reply.

“It’s a shirt, Ray.” You hissed, almost whispering. “Calm down.”

“God, you are such a - such a fucking faker.” He huffed in return, smoke flying out his nose with the fury of his words.

Your face contorted at this, partially frustrated, partially confused because you genuinely had no clue what he meant. He took another hot draw and then hesitantly passed the smoke back to you, and moved on heatedly to explain himself.

“You wanna rebel so badly, but you don’t have the balls to.” He said, his words casual, yet somehow bleeding with anger. An anger that had been building up for months toward you. “You go out all night partying, you complain about the system, but you don’t make the effort to make any real change. And I bet if The Major walked around that corner right now, you’d piss your dumb, tight little pants-”

“Shut the fuck up, Garraty.” You bit back, your voice dull rather than fighting. Truly - you knew that he wasn’t the enemy. You took a draw, and then added on: “You know nothing about my life, or what I’d be willing to do.”

He stared at you with harsh eyes, like a dog glaring through a cage, silently begging to be let out, as the smoke whipped past your lips.

‘Because you shut me out.’

He wanted to be bitter. He wanted to yell and stomp and cry over the fact that you had been trying to phase him out of your life since your brother’s death. He wanted to be more outwardly pissy that you weren’t leaning on him. He took the cigarette back from you and you frowned at him.

“You’re gonna get arrested.” He snapped, knowing that his worry for you came off as bitter frustration. He couldn’t help it, couldn’t control it. You rolled your eyes again, and it only further pushed him. “Do you know what those military prisons are like? Do you have any idea what they do to people?” You remained silent, and he couldn’t contain himself. “They shave your head, they waterboard you. They tie you up and leave you hanging for hours until the muscles in your arms go and your lungs start to give out, they-”

“Yeah, because you would know.” You hissed back. “Please, enlighten me from your time locked up.”

Ray knew that you wouldn’t listen to reason, and he remained silent.

“Or was it just horror stories from Daddy trying to get you to keep secret about the old copies of Neet-she that he kept under the floorboards?”

He should have been more offended about you talking about his father, but he had pulled the ‘dead dad’ card first.

“Shut up.” He sighed, taking another puff, looking off into the warmth of the orange sky rather than at you.

He hated that he found you pronouncing ‘Nietzsche’ incorrect to be oddly adorable. He hated that he let you take the cigarette back from him without another word. He hated that he had nothing else clever to say, letting the two of you fall into an easy silence as the sun fully set in the sky.

The two of you finished off the cigarette in silence, and as usual, he let you have the last drag from his fingers when the cherry was just barely biting at his skin - taking that bit of pain for you so you could properly enjoy it. (In the back of his mind, he pretended that you were kissing him on purpose - that you would have wanted to kiss his fingers because you loved him like that too.)

When you were done with it, he stomped it under the heel of his old, worn-out shoe - a pair that used to belong to his father. As the silence lulled between the two of you, and as he suspected that you would likely get up and leave any moment - he knew that he couldn’t wait much longer.

He had to tell you.

“I’m doing The Walk.”

He announced it suddenly, hoping to rip off the metaphorical band-aid, making it quick. In a moment, the air changed around the two of you. The calm, warm night air turned bitter and your relaxed posture - leaning back on your elbows with your legs outstretched completely shifted. You sat up straight and looked at him with a tense expression: a mixture of pure fear and dread painting your features as you waited for him to clarify, as though you thought your ears were mistaken.

You were waiting for him to take it back.

Ray exhaled anxiously, hated what would come next.

“I was selected for The Long Walk. I’m the home state walker. I-”

Anything further he had to say was disrupted by a harsh slap across the face. He shouldn’t have been surprised, and though you had clearly intended to hurt him, the stinging pain wasn’t nearly as bad as the shock - the shock that you would hit him.

“Ow!”

“How could you do this?” You screeched, your voice bellowing out in a terrible yell as you shot up off the porch, trying to distance yourself from him as though he had some kind of terrible disease. “How could you do this to us?!”

He barely had the capacity to take in the way you used ‘us’ - as though the two of you were certainly a couple, as though you were married, as though you were undoubtedly an item that he was selfishly trying to break apart without consulting you first. (Which was how he felt about a lot of your actions as of late, ironically.) Maybe that was already how you felt about the status of your relationship - your friendship so close and certain that you didn’t need a romantic label with Ray for that ‘us’ to be more important. Losing him as a friend would already hurt too much.

Perhaps in your mind, you were looping in his mother as well - that ‘us’ being the two of you, the women who would have to mourn him when he (in your mind) inevitably didn’t come home. He didn’t have the room to think about it, because once again, his worry for you flared up.

“How the fuck could you be such an idiot, Raymond Garraty? How could you be so selfish?!”

There were ordinances in place against too much noise - especially after dark. And your yells were against those rules. You were definitely too emotional to see that right now. You were angry and too wound up to care that you were being too loud about it.

“Can you keep it the fuck down?” He hissed under his breath. “You’re gonna get a noise ticket!”

You clenched your jaw and shook your head, crossing your arms sharply over his chest, hating that this was his only response.

When your words truly hit him, he added on:

“Selfish? How the fuck can you call me selfish when I’m doing this for the betterment of-?”

“Don’t feed me that bullshit!” You screamed back, and he immediately shushed you. You ignored it. “You fuckin’ hypocrite! You hate everything they stand for and you’re gonna turn into some fucking toy for their amusement? Don’t tell me that you of all people have fallen for the bullshit in those pamphlets - not after everything your dad taught you.”

He knew that he could never make you understand. His father’s death had driven him toward The Walk with a divine purpose, not away from it.

“It’s not about the goddamn pamphlets.” He shook his head. “Or the posters, or the commercials. I’m doing this for me.” He knew he couldn’t tell you his real reasoning, or surely - you would slap him again. You would try to stop him. Or even more insane - you would try to help. “We need the money-”

“No!” You shouted again. “Not ‘we’! Don’t loop me into your stupid, nut job idea!”

“Can you stop yelling, please?” He begged, his stomach twisting horribly at the idea of you getting arrested right before he had to leave for The Walk.

Fuck - if one of the neighbours called in about a simple noise ticket (which was was already bad enough to have on your record), and someone following up on that ticket saw your shirt, you would be thrown in jail without a second thought. And then, Ray would have to win The Walk and use his wish on getting you out, which is not what he had intended to do.

You stood there, your hands hovering tightly at your sides, looking like you were resisting the urge to slap him again. You rubbed your palms tightly on the denim, and then you huffed out:

“Eight by five.”

You couldn’t even look him in the eyes now. You were staring at the ground, your breath coming out in shallow bursts.

He knew that you had your arms stuck to your sides to keep your hands from shaking and he had to resist the urge to jump up off the porch and sweep you into a hug. He had a feeling that you likely wouldn’t accept his affection right now, but he wanted so desperately to comfort you. He wished that he had another cigarette to offer you, but the rest were still up in his bedroom, tucked under that floorboard - right alongside the books his father had hidden for him and some old notes that the two of you had exchanged in class, back when that felt like the most rebellious thing you ever could have done.

“What?” Ray gaped, having no idea what you were talking about.

“Eight by five. That’s the size of the cardboard box they’ll send you back in. Or - whatever’s left of you. Your ashes, at least.”

Your voice quivered as you said this, showing the first bit of your anger and spite giving way to fear and sadness - showing the true bereavement you felt for a man who was still alive in front of you. These days, you thought of The Long Walk as certain death. You thought Ray was nothing more than a dead man in front of you, waiting to be shot.

Ray hated that you didn’t seem to believe in him. That you seemed so determined that he could not win. But part of him couldn’t blame you. Your brother had been practically guaranteed success, and still -

“My brother now sits in a box on the fucking mantel.” You said, the words grinding against your throat harshly as your barely contained sobs strangled you. “You pass by him every single time you come into my house. He makes a great ornament, along with my drunk, catatonic mother-”

“I get it, alright?” He huffed back, the guilt beginning to gnaw at him now. He was putting you through it again - forcing you to sit in front of a television for days, just waiting for him to win or die.

“No. No, I don’t think you do.” You spit back bitterly, breathless as you tried your hardest to choke back tears. “They don’t even send back your tags. They reuse the same ones every year. So you’re gonna be wearing a number that some other guy died in.”

You heaved out a sigh and collapsed back down beside Ray, too weak to stand any longer.

“Why are you trying to scare me?” He asked, gentle, contemplative. “You really think I don’t know what I signed up for?”

“If you knew, you wouldn’t have signed up.” You told him, your voice still entirely bitter, but quiet now as the power seeped out of you, becoming too tired to further argue.

You turned your head away, but he still saw the way your hand moved toward your face, hastily wiping at tears.

“I’m not scared of dying.” Ray declared defiantly.

You shook your head harshly. You wanted to protest - wanted to tell him that he was selfish again. You wanted to cry out:

‘I’m scared of you dying, dickhead. What about me? What am I supposed to do when you die?’

But instead, you stayed bitterly silent.

Ray hated how your lack of response felt like a knife twisting through his gut. He wasn’t sure how he had been expecting this to go. He knew that you would never take it well. Goodbyes were never fond for anybody. He knew it was never going to be good, which was probably why he had been avoiding telling you for as long as he possibly could. But still, he had naively hoped that your last night together would be better than this.

In the back of his mind, he had dreamed that it would be much, much different than this. And that hope led to him saying something incredibly stupid.

“I’m not scared of dying - but I don’t wanna die a virgin.”

In the back of his mind, he did have a dreamy perspective on the whole thing. He thought that this confession would elicit something passionate from you. It was more than likely something that you already knew, just from being around him nearly all his life and knowing that he’d never had a girlfriend before, knowing that mostly everyone assumed that you were his girlfriend. You let people assume it, even though the two of you had never even kissed before.

He imagined that him being brave enough to actually say the words aloud would prompt some kind of reaction from you. Especially knowing that he was going off to near certain death. You would want to give him one last great night before he left, you would want him to not spend the night worrying about the horrors ahead, and the two of you would lock yourselves in his room and spend hours making love.

You would tell him that you loved him. You would mean it. He would tell you that he couldn’t say it back until he reached the finish line - and he would make it there. He would think about you the whole time to make it there.

Maybe a version of you from a few years ago would have been emotionally moved by this statement. A version of you that had still believed The Long Walk was winnable before your brother was killed by an old bridge. But now -

You let out a dry, bitter laugh. You whipped your head back toward him, and your expression was nothing short of venomous. But still, somehow he wasn’t prepared for the words you hurled at him next.

“You’re a pathetic idiot, Raymond Garraty. And I don’t pity you.”

Ouch.

He let out a soft sigh, defeated, and still - you kept going. As if willed on to prove beyond a doubt that he was so utterly wrong for trying to prompt sex out of you, especially after doing something as stupid as signing up for The Long Walk. You needed to hurt him as badly as he hurt you by signing his life away.

“You know, just cause I have a pussy, doesn’t mean I’m gonna pity fuck you.” You spat the words viciously, and it was a terrible slap in the face to him. It was a righteous reality check that had him quickly ripped away from his visions of sweet skin on skin and whispered ‘I love you’s. “I’m not gonna get all weak in the knees just cause you signed yourself up for a death march. I’m not gonna send you off cum drunk and happy with a kiss on the cheek. I’m not gonna fucking reward you for this. I am not that girl.”

Deep down, he knew this was how he should have expected it to go. Still - your words left him a little wounded.

“I get it.” He mumbled. “I’m an idiot.”

“Understatement of the fucking year.” You said tiredly in return.

A large part of him knew that your hostility was coming from a place of love. You were terrified of losing him.

Your entire family had already been taken from you by The Long Walk. Your father when working as a guard (and inevitably an executioner) on The Walk. He had gotten killed in the crossfire when someone charged the motorcade. (At least, that was the story Ray had overheard your mother telling his parents). Your brother had died trying to follow a supposedly easy path to victory, trying to gain a better life for you.

And even though your mother was still alive and breathing - she was a ghost of a person, consumed by grief, intentionally killing herself with every passing day, drinking herself to death as she sat between portraits of your father and brother, frozen in time where she had lost them. She pretended that you did not exist because you served no true purpose in her life. You were not either of the men that she had lost, so she did not acknowledge you.

The Long Walk had wiped out your entire family, and it was coming for Ray next.

At the end of the street, about a mile down, a pair of bright, blinding headlights pulled up. It was a military truck, three soldiers - a small unit on a nightly patrol.

Instinctively, Ray checked his watch - one that had belonged to his father.

“It’s getting close to curfew. You should go home.”

It was only a short walk next door, but if the two of you were caught out here, especially while you were wearing that fucking shirt - it wouldn’t just be a warning or a ticket with a fine, it would be something much worse. Ray might even be banned from doing The Walk. It would be easy to replace him with someone else. One of the many eager people who had entered and not been chosen. And if his place was taken from him - boom, there goes all the fucking plans he made.

Instead of getting up and running off home, you remained stony and silent, sniffing back tears, refusing to look at Ray. Even as the truck’s headlights drew closer, you didn’t seem too scared of getting caught, which made Ray all the more anxious. It was a presence that crept along, driving at a crawl, shining a spotlight between the houses to check for any ‘illicit activities’ - mostly so that people knew they were being watched, that was most important of all.

You didn’t speak on the matter of curfew - you didn’t say goodnight or goodbye or tell Ray to fuck off. Instead, you brought up something else entirely.

“You’re gonna need boots.” You stated. You knew it was likely hopeless that he would win. But in your mind, now, you were fighting to give him the best odds. “The handbook recommends boots. You’re not gonna get very far on those shitty old things.”

You gently kicked his foot, and he took a glance of shame down at his father’s old shoes, the soles already peeling away in some places, the laces ratty and worn and ready to snap. He wasn’t surprised that you still remembered things from The Long Walk Handbook - he had seen you pouring over it viciously in the days before your brother had to depart, as though you knowing everything in it would help him somehow.

“Grand fucking observation.” He sighed, utterly sarcastic, taking a glance over his shoulder, trying to see how far away the truck was - still far, barely crawling up the street. “Give me fifty bucks to buy a new pair before tomorrow and I’ll be on my way.”

He knew that you didn’t have that kind of money. Between your mother’s habits and her ability to sniff out money wherever you hid it, the fact that you often gave her money to get her off your back, and the fact that your job never paid that well in the first place - it was money you did not have. There were no stores in the desolate town anyway, not ones that sold good clothing. If anybody could scrounge up money for clothing that wasn’t patched together and second hand - they went to the city to buy it.

So he didn’t have the time or the money to get a new pair of boots before the nine am call to the front of the line.

“Come with me.” You breathed out, no true authority in your voice, knowing Ray was so used to following you that he would easily take the order.

You pushed yourself off the porch, walking off confidently. Hesitantly - taking another glance behind him to see how far off the truck was, hating the feeling of being watched even though they couldn’t yet see him, he moved to follow you. He followed you through the overgrown grass that had spurted up between your two houses. He was surprised when, instead of walking to the side screen door that led into your kitchen, you moved back behind the house, and went over to your brother’s long untouched old tool shed.

He caught a glimpse of your mother through that screen door - in the same place that she always was, sitting in front of your old TV, the light of the screen being the only one cast through the house at this time. She was watching a highlight reel that one of your father’s friends had made for her after she begged to see her son again. Footage from his Walk, playing on a loop over and over again - the last bits of his life, stuck, frozen in time. She sat there, and watched him, and drank. And that was her life now.

Ray had a passing thought about his mother ending up like that if he didn’t come home. Except for the fact that she would have no special favours to call in, and she would only get to see him again if they found him worthy of putting in their films. Which wouldn’t happen if he was particularly pathetic - if he ended up in twentieth place, or did something gracefully stupid, like dying first.

He had to shake it off, literally forcing the thoughts out of his head as he turned back to you and took the extra steps to catch up, coming to stand behind you at the shed’s door. He watched as you grabbed a small key from above the door and then struggled with the large padlock - it being particularly sticky and tough after not being opened for so long.

Eventually, you did get it to work for you, and you opened the door and tossed the loose lock inside on the floor. When Ray lingered awkwardly by the door, you huffed out:

“Come on.”

He stepped inside, and you reached overhead, pulling on a small chain for the single lightbulb - one you surely thought would be dead. Luckily, it still cast a dull yellow light over everything, and you crouched down and began to look through the many boxes that had been allocated to this space as unimportant. Things that had been cast in here as junk, but were still too good to get rid of completely.

To the left, Ray noticed a waist-high tool bench. Your brother used to be very good at mending things. He was the kind of person who could get an old jewelry box to play music again, old rollerblades to spin. He had fixed dents in Ray’s mothers pans and sharpened her knives when needed. He was someone always ready with a kind hand and a helping smile.

The bench however, seemed frozen in time. The wall above it was consumed by a large map - and Ray quickly realized that the bright red marking highlighted on it must have been the route that your brother had been given for The Long Walk. He had to wonder if this would be of any use to him, if they performed the same route every single year… but surely, they wouldn’t be so stupid. So many things could go wrong if they did things that way. Sabotage, a potential ambush, people cheating somehow.

There were also lists of supplies that he would need, and several of your father’s medals displayed - almost as if they were motivators for him while he prepared for the journey.

“Here.”

You turned back with something in your extended arm, and Ray’s stomach gave another harsh twist when he saw that it was a pair of military grade combat boots.

“These belonged to my father. They’ll probably fit you.”

As though the cool aura of a ghost had taken over the room, a chill shifted down Ray’s spine. Though you had stopped wearing his medal, Ray knew how… careful you were when it came to your father’s memory. How precious you were about his things being just so. You kept one of his shirts on a hook in your closet, and one time Ray had accidentally knocked it over, and you had called him a clumsy moron and not spoken to him for more than a whole day. (The longest that the two of you had gone without speaking since you had met.)

He knew this was a big gesture coming from you. Monumental, in fact. You hated that he had signed up for The Walk - but you were willing good faith onto him to force him to get through it and come out on the other side. You weren’t going to let him die so easily.

He reached for the boots, and once he got a good grip on them and tried to take them from you, you refused to let go. You looked into his eyes fiercely, looking for any kind of deadness - any sign that this was a suicidal streak, any sign that he was doing this because he had truly given up on you. You saw none, and that scared you even more.

Why the fuck had he signed up?

“Back out.” You said, your throat clenching down on the words way too much for your liking, turning it into a sad, sorrowful whisper rather than the firm order than you intended. “You know it’s a death sentence. You don’t have to do it-”

“I can’t.” Ray argued gently. “The backout date already passed. They changed it. Too many guys were backing out morning of and leaving them scrambling for replacements.”

“Fuck off.” You hissed, shoving the boots toward him, causing him to let out a grunt as the heft hit him squarely in the gut. Again, he knew your anger was not truly directed at him.

This was sore news to you, though strangely, you understood it. It was too much effort to have back-ups bussed out and waiting in the wings. They could have too much uproar on their hands if the potential replacements threw fits in disappointment if they didn’t get to participate. So many people got those last minute jitters, got too emotional saying goodbye to their loved ones at the starting line. It was easier when people had distance from the start of it, when they could be sure weeks out and then unsure when it was too late to back out.

Ray knelt down and started untying his old shoes, looking to try on the boots and hopefully, if they fit well, exchange his old shoes for these. The boots were sturdy, and they would carry him a lot farther. His stomach soured when you moved over to the work bench, turning your back to him, and he heard you sniffling once again, poorly concealing more cries. He couldn’t see it, but you were running your fingers over your father’s medals, thinking about him.

You had never told a soul before, not even Ray - but on the morning that your brother had left for The Walk, he had been escorted to the startling line by a soldier who was a dear friend of your father’s. And that man gave you a letter - an envelope slipped into your pocket with the whispered words that you shouldn’t tell anybody. You had become so distracted with watching your brother’s progress on TV that you soon forgot about it, didn’t even consider what it might be. It was only days later, when you were laying in bed, soaked in tears and woefully mourning your brother’s death that you had seen the paper hanging out of your jacket pocket, thrown over the back of your desk chair in a haste, and you remembered it once again.

It had been your father’s handwriting. Something he had written to your brother years previous with you only mentioned as a third party. It had been written shortly before his death. And it explained everything.

Though your father had fought in The War and thought it was a valiant cause, and at the time, he had won medals for saving his fellow soldiers and civilians along the way, he was beginning to see through the lovely haze that the military painted. The War had been won. There were no more dangers for him to be protecting innocent people against. There was no need for him to use his power and authority to harass everyday people. And though he loved his country and what wearing the uniform represented, he was beginning to question the orders that he was being given.

When they asked him to work on The Long Walk, that was the last straw for him.

At first, he refused. He saw no point in callously killing young boys in the name of some contest - but of course, The Major went through the one vein he knew would make your father truly bleed. His family was threatened. They told your father that his son was ‘guaranteed’ a spot on The Walk when he turned eighteen, whether he entered or not, perhaps ‘even sooner’. They told him that his daughter would make a nice prize for one of the Walkers some day, a nice ‘treat’ to dangle on a race with no finish line, threatening to change the rules altogether. He threatened other things that your father ‘dare not write down’ - and you couldn’t imagine what horrors they had taunted him with.

So he surrendered, and he joined them. And they made his death look like an accident. A war hero who was taken down by a young man who didn’t even know how to use a gun. In reality, he had been shot by one of his fellow soldiers from an angle that cameras couldn’t see. His death hadn’t been quick - he had been shot in the gut and dragged behind the motorcade for more than a mile. That was something you had read on the back of the letter, written in guilt by your father’s friend, something he thought you ‘needed to know’.

It had happened out of view of the cameras, just another act of censorship where life was so much different than what they showed on television. A punishment of agony and humiliation where the Walkers were allowed to laugh at him, mock him, and even piss on him as he slowly died. A clear warning to any other soldiers who considered speaking up against The Long Walk.

Of course, your father had no idea it would happen. He was just writing the letter as a case of insurance, feeling the pressure encroach on him. Wanting your brother to remember him truthfully. But it was too late. His son was hauled off to a fate he was supposed to be protected from, and you were the last one left standing. It was a truth that never should have gotten to you - and it only did because of a man whose life your father had saved once, and a sense of loyalty that no longer fit this world.

Your father’s best friend had held onto the letter for a long time, debating whether or not he should give it to you. But seeing your brother be taken away and knowing that he might not come back, knowing that you were finally mature enough to handle the contents of what your father had written down - he finally delivered it to you. Your father had died abandoning a naive child, but the young woman who was waving her brother off needed to know the truth.

Reading that letter changed you. You had been someone who fed into all of it since you were a child. Uncle Sam protects us. America The Beautiful - The Land of The Free, and The Home of The Brave. So why the fuck would they kill your father on purpose? Why would they go after the bravest man you knew? That wasn’t freedom. That wasn’t justice.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, but you came to realize in such a short, crashing time - it was all rigged. It was all fucked. They picked your brother as their favourite and they couldn’t even stop him from dying. And they abandoned your family the second that they were no longer of use to the US Government.

So - what now? Where the fuck were you supposed to from here?

They were about to kill off the last good man in your life, the last thing you had to love. They were about to finish taking everything from you. And then what?

Ray felt strange as he stood up wearing your father’s boots. They fit well, and they had the odd comfort of having been worn-in for many hours by someone else before.

“They fit.” He said dully, unsure if you were listening or if you were mentally someplace else.

You didn’t respond, and he hoped that he could have the worn-in comfort of telling you another horrible thing while you were too far gone to hear it.

“When I win, I’m gonna kill The Major.”

Your breath stilled in your chest. You wanted to ask ‘how’, but knowing him, he already had a plan. He wouldn’t have set out on this if he didn’t. He wasn’t going to hash out the details with you, but it was probably a stupid plan.

Of all the fucking stupid, thoughtless things -

If there was a small chance of him winning and being able to come home, he was going to ruin it. He was going to be arrested on site or shot in the fucking head. Winner for the press, be damned. They would never let him get away with it.

“Moron-” You wheezed, almost unable to breathe past all the intense emotions you were feeling. “You fucking-”

Acting purely on the rage flowing through your veins, you reached underneath the wood of the work bench and groped blindly for something you knew had to be there. Ray’s entire system tightened with panic when you whipped around with a gun in hand. He had no clue what kind of gun it was, he wasn’t knowledgeable enough to identify it on sight - but he had to guess that it had been your father’s sidearm when he was active on duty. Somehow, you had ended up with it and hidden it here.

You pressed it tightly to Ray’s neck, and he backed up one step, then two, until he was tripping over the boxes, his entire body tight with anxiety as you crowded up against him, pressing the barrel into his throat tightly enough to make him gag.

What the hell were you doing?

Ray didn’t know that it wasn’t loaded.

Your brother made sure the few bullets that you had were stored separately - the goody-two-shoes part of him was always hell bent about stuff like that. He had been the one to screw a metal bracket under the table to hide it, not wanting to get caught with it. Perhaps the worst thing he ever did was keep it when his too good nature meant he should have turned it in after your father’s death.

Yes, you and your brother both had gun training at a young age because your father insisted upon it. But what the hell would the two of you ever have to shoot at?

“I should fucking kill you right now.” You choked out, horribly breathless as fat tears streaked down your cheeks - somehow, you were the one infinitely more afraid while he had a gun pressed to his neck. “It would be quicker.”

If he was so determined to die, you should be the one to do it. He belonged to you - he had nearly all his life. His death should be yours too. Why should they be the ones to take him from you? Why should they get to take more from you?

He was yours.

You should be the one to do him the mercy. You should get to keep him close by. You should get to visit him.

You shouldn’t have to accept another set of ashes in a damn box.

Ray stared you down with wide eyes, seemingly more terrified for your mental state than the fact that there was a gun pressed to his neck. Tense emotions flashed through him - a spark of panic, fear, worry, love - but not once did he look truly terrorized. He swallowed thickly, and brought a shaking hand up, prepared to take the gun from you. Not for a second did he ever truly believe that you were ready to actually shoot him.

Of course, just then - the military patrol truck made it to this point on the street. The blinding lights came around the side of Ray’s house first, and it gave him just enough time to act fast. Not even considering you as a potential danger of your gun, not considering it a danger at all when wielded by you, he shoved past you and reached for the door to the shed, grabbing it and shutting the two of you inside. And then, realizing it would be a dead giveaway, he reached up and yanked on the chain to the lightbulb overhead, turning it off.

As the headlights and the shifting manned spotlight on top of the truck came closer, Ray realized that there was a small window beside the shed’s door. It was partially obscured by boxes, but the two of you might still be spotted through it. So, trying his best to hide, he shoved himself right up against you, unintentionally pinning you to the work bench with the gun tightly wedged between your bodies in order not to be seen through that window.

You were both silent - barely even breathing as the lights passed, as the loud diesel engine of the truck chugged on, taking far too long to pass. Once it was gone, you were both swallowed up into a terrible darkness. But neither of you bothered to reach up and turn on the light.

Instinctively, hating the feeling of the metal pressed up against his body, Ray reached over and snatched the gun from your grip, and you let it go almost too easily. He put it on the work bench top and abandoned it there - hoping it would stay there, out of your hands.

Ray stood with his hands on either side of you then, trapping you against the work bench, glaring at you with intense anger in his eyes as you were overwhelmed by the heat coming off him. You were too tired to escape, and you were forced to listen to him now.

“You’re the moron if you think that pointing a gun at me is any kind of good idea,” He huffed, his breath annoyed and hot against your face.

You scowled at him, your eyes settled into a mixture of anger and horrible sour love that he had never seen from you before.

“Why the fuck do you wanna wave that thing in my face when you could be pointing it at those assholes outside? Why are you being so fuckin’ petty, huh?” He spoke in a low, bitter tone, and the sourness in your gut clashed horribly with something you never wanted to admit was lust while you stared at the pink of his lips, so damn close. “Why the fuck would you point it at me when you could point it at someone like The Major? You have a gun and the skills to use it - you could be making real change. But you have such a pissy fucking attitude. All you wanna do is get drunk and whore it out at rock concerts-”

You slapped him again. This one stung more - maybe because that comment had been more personal, and you put more behind it. Maybe because he had been fishing for something he had only suspected up until now, something that kept him up at night that he hated to think about. That part of your nightly activities, part of the reason you snuck around was because you were out with other guys.

And maybe the horrible sting across his cheek now confirmed that for him.

“Stop doing that!” He hissed, reaching up and gently grasping at his cheek, hating that his teeth hurt slightly now.

“You really think that’s what you’re gonna do?” You bit back, your throat horribly tight once again.

Ray was slightly dumb - maybe from the slap, but he wondered if you meant that he was going to be the one whoring it out at rock concerts.

“You’re gonna make ‘real change’?” You echoed back his words in mocking, and he looked at you dully, believing that he didn’t need to confirm it with words. Of course he believed that’s what killing The Major would do. “You think that you’re gonna change the world when you have your brains splattered all over the fucking pavement? You think that anybody is gonna remember Ray Garraty after you become just another dead Walker? Do you think that you’re gonna be anything more than just another toy for their game?”

He hated the pinch of your words - the idea that even you might not care to remember him if he died out there. Something that stung harder than any slap to the face ever could have, something that poked his heart like a sharp pin piercing through a balloon, making his insides pop, forcing all the strength out of him, all at once. It was probably the build-up of emotions that drove him to it, drove him truly insane. The fact that he had pictured this night so differently, wanting it to be a beautiful, gentle goodbye, and you were fighting him every single step of the way.

And now, he needed his own way to fight back.

He leaned in before he could think, crowding just a bit further into your personal space, alright so tight near you, and before you could blink, he smothered you in a messy, inexperienced kiss. You let out a startled noise - even with all his talk earlier, somehow, this had been the last thing you expected. You reached up to grab at his shirt, initially in a rush to push him off you, because no - you weren’t going to let this happen. You weren’t going to let him do that soft, predictable thing. You weren’t going to let him kiss you sweetly and ‘make love’ to you one time right before he went off and got his brains blown out.

Even if you had wanted this for years, you weren’t going to let it happen now. You weren’t going to let him scoop out your insides and break you in the worst way, leaving you to be nothing more than a drunken ghost sitting next to your mother. You weren’t going to let him fuck you, eternally fucking you up in the process.

Fuck, if he did this, you might just load the gun and go off and shoot yourself the second you knew he got his ticket punched. You had at least one bullet to make that happen.

You couldn’t let him do this.

But still, as your fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt and you felt the softness of his chest against your palms, the pure warmth of his flesh - a chest you had laid your head against so many times, both in joy and sadness. When the two of you had spread out a blanket to look up at the stars and he had let you lay against him as a pillow, when he had been your literal rock through your brother’s death, the person you leaned on while you cried… you couldn’t bring yourself to push him away. Your grip shook, and stupidly - you pulled him closer.

Feeling him so close - he was too soft, too welcoming, too familiar. He was the comfort that you needed right now when he was the source of your pain.

He moaned against you at this, and soon, that simple lip-lock turned vicious.

You were so angry with him. For signing up, for signing his life away, for wanting to do something as stupid as killing The Major. For damning himself with the idea, for not wanting to come home to you. And now, for doing this. You were so goddamn mad at him.

You bit his bottom lip harshly and shoved your tongue past his teeth without hesitation when his jaw dropped open with a groan of complaint. You couldn’t bring yourself to care about his pain right now - you needed a bit of petty revenge, you needed to feel him. His tongue flailed in his mouth, inexperienced and unsure, desperately trying to keep up, uncaring of the twinge of coppery blood he now tasted, too spoiled with the victory that he was now kissing you.

You put a hand on the back of his head, forcing him in place as you smashed your lips even tighter against his, bruising, trying your hardest to suck the life out of him - trying to make that life yours if he was so damn determined to be wasteful with it. He let out pitiful little whimpers and moans and continued to grip tightly onto the work bench on either side of your waist, all sense leaving him as the oxygen was depleted from his brain.

In the back of his mind, he could sense your experience. He could feel your lips moving in such a precise way, designed to drive him mad. He had to wonder how many other guys you had been with, who they were. But he didn’t have the room to truly be jealous when you gave a sharp tug on the back of his hair and bit his lower lip again. He had you now. That was all that mattered.

He let out a particularly pathetic whine when you pulled away from the kiss - using your grip on his hair to yank him away from your lips, though he did lean in desperately and chase you like you were the only source of oxygen in the tiny, quickly heating room. His lips were now slightly swollen and so perfectly wet with your spit, and he couldn’t resist the urge to dip his tongue out and lick it off, tasting a bit of his own blood that you had drawn from your biting.

It was nothing like he had imagined a first kiss with you would be - but fuck, it was so damn perfect.

He thought that would be the end of it. He thought you would push him away and tell him to fuck off back to his own house with the boots. That you would tell him not to die in a hushed, angry voice. And for sure, that would be the last he ever saw of you, whether he won or lost.

He was a little more than shocked when you heaved yourself up to sit on the edge of the work bench and spread your knees wide, as if inviting him to come further between them - inviting him to get closer to you.

“Come on, Garraty.” You said, your voice impatient, irritated.

You didn’t wait for him to move before you reached out and weaved two fingers behind his belt buckle, yanking him forcefully closer in a way that made him grunt. You were always stronger than he remembered, and he was tingling with lust and weak to you, so that definitely helped.

“If you’re so determined to go out there and have your brains blown out, I get to have you now. I get to have this.” You said it in a dull, disappointed voice - like having sex with him wasn’t even something you wanted to do. (He didn’t realize that you were once again holding back tears at the thought of him being killed, trying to enjoy the time you still had with him.)

“Thought you said that you ‘weren’t that girl’?” He replied, relaying your earlier words back to you. He knew it was dumb, almost like he was trying to talk you out of it. But he wanted you to be sure. He didn’t want you to regret this, even if he didn’t live to see that regret.

“Well, you’re the asshole who kissed me first.” You argued, giving him a sharp look. “I’ll take your dumb little virginity, and I guess I’ll have to take the eight by five, too.”

It was the most stripped down version of ‘til death do us part’. It was a marriage in few words, a promise that you had always been his, and the horrible thought that you were about to consummate when it was two breaths too late.

You swallowed thickly, holding back tears as you thought about it, your movements stiff and aggressive as you unbuckled Ray’s belt. Your words sent a sharp shiver through him and put an ache in his bones, and he couldn’t bring himself to stop you. He wanted it too badly. He wanted you.

“Why are you so fucking determined for me to die?” He hissed. “Do you want me dead?”

“Not me - you! You’re the one who wants to die!” You argued back. “You’re the one who signed up.”

You were far too angry for someone with your hands gripping the fabric of his jeans, shoving them down over his hips. Your nails left stinging marks down across the tender skin of his ass from the aggressive nature of your movements, causing a sharp hiss from the back of his throat as his cock bobbed in the air - too hard and ready for the situation, too eager for the conversation the two of you were having.

“I don’t wanna die.” He replied, his voice dull.

But any logic or better argument died off in his brain as you reached for your own button, ripping at the fly of your jeans, and his eyes became glued to this spot.

“You could’ve fooled me.” You huffed back bitterly. “We could have been happy, Ray. But you chose this.”

Was that true? Was that true at all?

Should he have proposed to you instead of letting your brother go off to The Walk? Should have crawled to you on his knees, begging to be your idiot husband with nothing more to offer than his dumb, full heart and his good intentions?

“Fuck-” He hissed out, his eyes squeezing shut and his mind going blank as you got a grip on his cock, pumping him in tight, vicious strokes - nothing gentle or sweet about it. You were handling him like you owned him, like you had every right to his body and you were more than upset that he was wasting on The Long Walk without your consent.

Your pants were hanging off one ankle now, your legs spreading wider for him as you hooked an ankle around the back of his thigh and forced him forward. He could already feel the heat coming off you and it made him even dizzier.

It was too late for any of that now. It was too late for regrets and ‘what if’s. Now, all the two of you had was this moment, temporary as the cigarette smoke swirling up from the porch and disappearing into the night sky that you once admired with hope in your eyes. All he had was the roughness of your grip and the burning heat he could feel coming from between your thighs, as vengeful and all consuming as the bite of the angry words you had been hurdling at him all evening.

He surged forward and kissed you again, needing to pretend at least that this was about love and sweetness and not some tragic goodbye, indulging in the feeling of your soft lips. Your hand on his hip pushed him forward until the tip of his cock brushed right against your wetness, a gaping wound just as sensitive as your heart, far too ready to let him in, far too ready to be carved out and broken by him.

But of course - just then, the patrol truck drove by again. Driving back up the street in the opposite direction on their way out of the neighbourhood. The loud grind of tires against the unpaved gravel road, the blinding spotlight flashing by. Both of you were safely out of view, but still - Ray’s whole body stiffened up and he found himself holding his breath for the creeping, terribly slow moments until they passed.

It was one last chance for both of you to change your minds.

But no - not really. Either way, tomorrow he still had to leave. Tomorrow he would still have to set out on a journey from which he might never return. He might never see you again. He highly doubted that you would wait on the sidelines to see him, even if you were allowed to. He doubted that you would even watch him on TV. After what had happened with your brother, he knew you couldn’t handle building up that hope again just to have it come crashing down. Maybe that was why it was easier for you to think of him as a dead man the second that you knew he signed up for The Walk.

And if you wanted to fuck a dead man, then he would let you.

So he shoved his hips forward with certainty and in a second, he became sluggish and dumb at the feeling of your heat and wetness enveloping him, already an intense and overwhelming feeling. It was just the tip of his cock, and he found himself stuttering and still, his whole body already lulling into a stupid ragdoll. But you put your hand tightly on one of his asscheeks, digging your nails in and pushing, forcing him forward in one abrupt movement - something that knocked the wind out of him as his stomach muscles tensed.

You were so hot, so tight around him, so perfect -

“Oh, fuck.” He groaned, shoving his face into your neck instinctively, his whole body becoming alight with an intense fire as he was consumed by that heat, swallowed up by that tightness for the first time.

You didn’t have as much of a reaction as he would have expected - a sharp inhale of breath, your body tensing slightly, your hips angling toward him. It was nothing like the loud, girlish moans that guys he hung out with claimed their girlfriends let out. It wasn’t the kind of sounds that would disturb neighbours and ‘get them caught’ by their parents, meaning that they would have to sneak around to have sex.

For a moment, Ray wondered if he was doing something wrong.

“Come on, fuck me.” You told him, your voice turning into an unforgiving hiss.

You gave his ass an abrupt slap, like he was some kind of plough horse on a farm that needed encouraging. It was a move that sent a sharp sting across his skin, easily confusing him, melting somewhere along the inside and only making his cock throb harder inside of you.

Fuck - why did he love it so much when you were so demanding?

“You wanted this.” You reminded him, a distinctly nagging tone in your voice.

“Jesus, gimme a minute.” He whined in return, struggling to breathe, wondering how he was able to stay upright on his own two legs right now. Somehow feeling both floating and heavy, feeling like the entire world was balanced on the pinpoint of his swollen, aching cock, the moon somewhere between your breasts pressed up against him and your voice in the stratosphere. “I gotta - fuck.”

Somehow, he managed to move his legs - widening his stance a bit to stabilize himself, keeping one hand on the wood of the bench beside you and putting the other one on your hip, gripping you intensely possessively, his palm already too sweaty. And then, he was off. Spurred purely by instinct and the need to smother himself further in your perfect heat, he pulled himself back only a bit, barely pulling out at all, before he nudged his hips forward again.

And again, and again, only moving a fraction of an inch, barely humping you, absolutely hesitant to pull out of you at all - desperate not to miss this feeling, not to miss you. He was already addicted to the feeling of your pussy, so warm and lively around his cock, and he couldn’t leave it, not for a second.

It wasn’t any useful friction for you. It was barely causing a hum in your gut, definitely wouldn’t drive you to an orgasm.

But still - there was something too precious and too annoying and too damn hot about Ray in these moments. The way he was whining into your neck, the tight scrunch of his expression as he struggled with the newly found pleasure, the way he speared his hard cock into you with such a lack of skill, humping you like you were a lifeless pillow. It was so irritating and it stirred something deep in you because it was so Ray. Nothing performative, nothing fancy - just letting himself feel in front of you because he knew that you weren’t going to judge him for it.

“Come on,” You told him, your voice slightly breathy now, so far the only evidence that he was having any real effect on you - aside from the slickness smearing over his cock. “Come on, you can do better than that.”

The encouragement made him dizzy, your voice grating against him in a way that was so memorable and cut right to his core. That along with your hands on his hips, gripping at the fat of his love handles, touching him so possessively rather than avoiding touching his body, embracing him like you loved him, like he couldn’t be more perfect. Your nails dug into his flesh, causing another sting that zapped right through him, and you used that grip to pull him back just a bit further before you slammed his hips into your pussy with more heft, more force.

“Come on, do it right.” You said it almost bitterly, like you were annoyed with him - but he was too pussy drunk to be embarrassed or find himself inadequate.

He shoved his face tight into your neck and let out a rippling, whiny moan that he could not contain. It was a sound that you would remember forever - him at his most raw and unfiltered, truly lost in pleasure because of you. He began to speed up his thrusts, almost like he couldn’t control it, like you had shown him how good fucking actually felt, as opposed to having his cock just seated deep inside of you like he was foolishly trying to make a home there.

He slapped his hips against your faster, like an eager jackrabbit. Like a man possessed, driven by the swelling need in his gut, driven by the need to be close to you, he needed more.

“Do something right for once.” You huffed out, a bitter edge on your voice once again.

Those words stung. He felt your anger back now, so truly tuned into you. He lifted his head up to meet your eyes, surprised to see that you were looking back at him with a unique shine of sadness and bitter anger.

“Don’t fucking start again-” He grunted out, his hips still slamming into yours, heavy breaths panting against your chin.

“No.” You said, reaching up and roughly grabbing his jaw, holding his face tightly to your own, forcing him to look into your eyes, forcing him to hear you. “No - you don’t get to decide. You don’t get to tell me I can be angry.”

“Y/N-” He breathed out, and you abruptly cut him off by digging your nails into his cheeks, silencing him with a moan as more confusing sparks roused through him.

You then wrapped your legs securely around his waist, trapping him in a vice, forcing him still, stopping his thrusts as his cock gave a pathetic throb of protest. You forced him so tightly against your body, his cock deep inside you, nested and still once again. You locked him there, trapped, showing how much power you truly had over him.

He choked off a wounded sound in the back of his throat while you looked at him with nothing but fire in your eyes, your hand migrating further down his neck, leaving small stinging marks on his cheeks. You gripped onto the thickness of his neck, squeezing oh-so-slightly, threatening his life again, just barely, and stopping him from speaking any further while you made him oh-so-dizzy as oxygen became scarce in his brain.

“You’re mine.”

You said it with such fitful passion swelling up in your voice, sounding on the verge of tears.

I’m yours.

Ray thought the words, tried to say them, and it came out as nothing more than a choked off syllable. But you knew - it was so clear in his eyes. You knew.

Ray didn’t ever know that he would be so lucky to have your hand around his throat, but he didn’t know if he could feel complete without it now. Especially because he could feel the words shaking through his cock - he could feel the true passion of your declaration vibrating on every inch of his cock.

“You don’t get to tell me that I’m too pissy, or too upset when you’re supposed to be mine. This life is supposed to be mine, supposed to be ours-” You gave his neck a gentle squeeze, choking on your words as your tears welled up, so intensely emotional. The action caused his blood flow to stutter, causing an unexpected zap of pleasure through him that made his hips flail against you while he let out another groan. “-and you went and sold it off without even asking me first.”

“I’m sorry.” Ray wheezed out.

You released his throat, smoothing your hand down his chest, the touch lingering too sweetly near his heart.

“Shut up. And finish fucking me before I change my mind.” You told him, mourning creeping into your voice as you loosened your legs around his hips.

You gave a few harsh blinks, trying to stave off tears. He didn’t move away, instead leaning in and brushing his forehead along your cheek in silent comfort. You nudged against the softness of his lower back with the hard edge of your sneaker, encouraging him to pump his hips into your warm, wet cunt once again to continue chasing his orgasm. It was almost difficult at this point; his mind so lustful and sad, so cloudy and regretful.

He didn’t know how he was going to leave you after this.

“I’m sorry.” He whimpered, collapsing down to press his forehead against your breast. Those taunting words - FUCK THE MAJOR - scrawled by you, now so close by, and barely readable in the dark. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, fuck - I’m sorry.”

“God, you’re so pathetic.” You hissed back, he was almost sure that the shine of tears was rougher in your voice, more clear now.

He wasn’t sure why those words made his cock throb harder. But it made him fuck into you with more vigor, igniting the space with thicker sounds of flesh on flesh as his pelvis smacked into your cunt with raw, pure madness, his cock filling you in a blur again and again. Maybe it was because anything coming from you sounded like a compliment, or because him being so pathetic got him into this position - between your thighs, basking in your perfection.

So him being pathetic had to be a good thing.

“I know.” He murmured back, tucking his head tightly into your neck and leaving a small kiss there.

“I can’t - I can’t fucking believe I’m in love with you.”

These words hit Ray like a ton of bricks.

You were in love with him.

Not just the sweet love you shared as kids. Not, it was clear now - it was the devastating kind of marriageable ‘in love’ - the kind that meant this was all truly such a big mistake.

Ray had fucked up. Big time.

“Fuck, I’m sorry.” He choked out again, finding himself crying now, thick tears leaking down his face. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry-”

He had signed a death warrant. He had made sure you would lose the last man in your life who truly cared about you.

It was all his fault.

You grabbed him by the hair, using a tight grip to yank his head back. It was a tight spike of pain that somehow sent another jolt of pleasure through his cock, making his hips hump against you with absolutely no rhythm now, entirely sloppy and desperate. He was getting so close to the edge.

“You have to look at me.” You huffed. “You have to fucking look at me - look me in the eyes while you’re ruining my fucking life. Look at me while you break my heart, Garraty.”

A horrible bolt of guilt struck him like a spear through the chest, and he rushed to pull out, especially knowing how close he was. He couldn’t go through with this - fuck, this was so stupid. How much of an idiot was he? What if he got you pregnant and left you with a bastard?

He wheezed and flailed but you trapped him tightly with your legs once again and his jaw fell open wide in a horrible moan as you clenched your cunt down on him and squeezed.

“Cum for me, Ray.”

“Fuck - ah, fuck.” He huffed out. And before he could control himself, he said the fatal words in return. “Fuck - I love you. I love you so much.”

You used that grip on his hair to rip his head back farther, over-extending his neck in a slightly uncomfortable way, and Ray let out a yelp when you dug your teeth into his neck, forcing a fierce claiming bite onto him. If he was going to die within the next few days, he was going to die marked as yours. It wouldn’t be until later that he would find blood dripping down his skin and know how just wild you were with this, how utterly mad you had gone.

But soon you went sweet again, finally going soft on him for the first time that night. You grabbed his face roughly by both cheeks and pulled him into a kiss as he moaned loudly and flailed against you, his body so overtaken by pleasure, his veins roaring with electricity as he came inside you. He knew he should have tried harder to pull out, he knew he shouldn’t have been enjoying this - but fuck, he shouldn’t help but to savour your warmth while he could when death was so close to biting at his back.

He hated that he felt the slickness of your tears against his cheeks as the fog in his brain began to clear. His cock was barely starting to soften, his skin still buzzing, and he was already mopping up your grief and trying to store it away like he had so many other times before.

He had to do something. He had to better apologize.

He had ruined your life, and he knew he couldn’t even begin to make up for that - but he knew he had to try.

Without much further thought, Ray pulled out of you, pulling his briefs back up over his now very wet cock (causing the fabric to stick to his skin in an uncomfortable way). And then he dropped to his knees in front of you.

“Ray-”

“Your turn to shut up now.” He huffed, a lazy demand that only had you listening because you wanted to. Because you were too curious to see how he would proceed.

His breath came out in cooling puffs against the slickness of your used cunt as he put both hands on both your thighs, bracketing them from the outside. He grabbed you with such gentle intensity, like he truly loved you, like you were something to treasure. He silently encouraged you to scoot closer - and with a gentle placement of those thighs on the broadness of his shoulders, he dove in, clumsy and inexperienced and messy and oh-so-in love, trying his hardest not to think about the fact that this first time might be the last that he would get to taste you.

If anything, he tried to enjoy it more because of that.

He tried not to be timid, tried not to think about the fact that he might be ‘gross’ or that he might scare you away with the depth of his desire. He tried not to shove that desire down, so eager because of how much time he had thought about this with a hand on his cock. (Especially since he had heard other guys talk about it, since he had found out that guys did put their mouth on a girl’s cunt and immediately wondered what yours tasted like.)

He shoved his head into your pussy without hesitation, enjoying the oddly soft feeling of the wet flesh pressing against his face, like laying himself against an open wound - hot, incredibly warm, raw, exposed flesh. So intimate, so fucking close to your insides, close enough that he could feel your heartbeat against his cheeks, he could feel the flutters of your breath against his tongue as you made small, pretty gasps for breath.

He didn’t hesitate to reach out and lap like a greedy dog. He tasted the musk of you and the salty tang of himself and he felt a streak of pride that he had marked you here, too stubborn to think about the fact that this would fade. He couldn’t let himself think that he would die soon and you would move on, that you would be fucked by other men after you had forgotten him, while his eight by five box sat on your mantel and you had long forgotten about a friend you once called Raymond Garraty.

He tried to spite it. Tried to spite time, the future, his own death chasing him that he had willingly signed up for. He had to spite all of it while he was still allowed to have your perfect taste on his tongue, your beautiful thighs bracketing his head, shutting out the horrible world.

He shoved his tongue deep inside your cunt, trying to make a home for himself there while his nose bounced on your thrumming clit, smothering himself in you. He let out unashamed moans into your flesh while he lapped, and lapped, and lapped up the mess he had made of you, torn between leaving clear evidence between your thighs of his presence or stealing it all back for himself. Wanting to sucking up the taste and the memories and keep it all because he needed it more right now.

He hated it, but he couldn’t entirely tell if you were enjoying it.

Your body was shaking and you were making some sounds - but with your thick breaths and the tears pouring down your face and the mourning in your lungs, it was difficult to tell if your cries were from anguish or pleasure. He sucked hard on your clit, and when you came, it wasn’t on his radar. It was a gentle orgasm that rolled through the pit of your stomach, and it barely mattered to you. You didn’t care if you came - an orgasm would only last moments, and you needed Ray for a lifetime. Your chest was aching and you could barely stand the sight of that red hair between your thighs any longer. It was something you knew that you would never get to have again, you would miss it too damn much. So you put a firm hand on the collar of his shirt and yanked him back up.

You kissed him hard on the mouth, not minding your own taste.

“You’re such a fucking asshole.” You cried gently against his lips.

Ray wasn’t surprised when you broke down into sobs. He wanted to ask if he had done something wrong, but he likely already knew the answer. This wasn’t about the sex, it was about what was to follow. It was about The Long Walk. So - just as he had done on that day your brother passed through town, nothing more than a shambling ghost, he held you close to his chest while you cried.

It felt like the two of you stayed in that position for hours, but logically, Ray knew that it wasn’t more than a few minutes. He just hated the sound of your cries, he knew that it made time pass slower for him. When the sounds dissolved off into silence, he felt the need to bring up something of interest to him - a large bottle he had spotted on a shelf above your head.

“What’s this?” He asked, grabbing the bottle and pulling it out.

He was surprised to see that it was a very large, very fancy looking bottle of Scotch. It was marked as being made in Kentucky and from the looks of the wax on the top and the gold on the label - it must have been worth more than everything in the shed combined.

“That was my brother’s.” You told him, still tearful. “One of the military guys gave it to him before his Walk. He said that they were gonna use it to celebrate after he won.”

The words came out as a cruel, heavy taunt, and Ray felt too heavy himself as you said it.

“I had forgotten about it, honestly.” You added on with a sniffle. “If I had remembered it was here, I probably would have traded it for something. I could have traded it to get you some better fucking gear if you had told me earlier.”

You mumbled the last part, a distant thought spilling from your lips, and Ray didn’t bother arguing back.

You took a glance around, and then grabbed a nearby screwdriver. You gently grabbed the bottle from Ray and used the tool to chip off the wax, and then unscrewed the bottle. You put it to your lips and took a long swig, and after you swallowed, you let out a bitter laugh.

“I guess the expensive shit actually is better.”

You extended the bottle out to Ray, offering him some, and he shook his head, taking a gentle step back. He finally pulled his pants up, trying to right himself. He knew that sadly he couldn’t stay in this little bubble with you forever. He would have to meet the harsh reality that was coming for him.

“I need to be in good shape tomorrow. I think the only thing worse than a long fucking walk across Maine in the heat would be - a long fucking walk across Maine in the heat while hungover.” He pointed out honestly.

You nodded.

“Don’t forget to drink water.” You told him, taking another swig of the Scotch. “They refill your canteen, and there’s no limit on canteens - so don’t hesitate. You shed way more water than you think while sweating, so don’t just drink when you’re thirsty. And don’t get all shy about whipping your dick out to piss. Nature is nature out there, nobody gives a fuck.”

Ray nodded, surprised that you were now eagerly giving him tips - rallying for him to survive. But he would take all the help he could get. And he knew that your tips were more than well informed with how many times you had watched The Long Walk on TV in the past (mandated by your father when he had worked for the military) and how many times you had read through the handbook before your brother left.

“And bring a rag or something with you - something to wipe sweat off your face. And you can dump water onto it and dab it on your skin so you don’t get too hot. If your head gets too hot, out in the sun for too long, you’ll cook like an egg and get stupid and then you’ll wander right off the road. But don’t dump water right on your head, because if your clothes don’t get dry by dark, you’ll freeze.”

Ray nodded, doing his best to take in the information and retain it - knowing that if he was smart when it came to books, you were way smarter with this stuff.

You took another large chug of the drink, and he wanted to say something about it. He wanted to take it from you.

“You’ll need a hat. You got a hat?”

He shook his head in the negative. “I don’t think so.”

You let out a sigh and put the bottle on the bench before you hopped down, stumbling slightly, causing Ray to instinctively catch you. You shoved him away, rejecting the care as it caused a sting through your insides. But you didn’t say anything as you put both your legs back in your pants and pulled them up, not yet zipping them before you went back into the boxes. It was a quick moment this time before you turned around with a military green bucket hat that had a string across the bottom, and you reached over and shoved it onto his head.

You titled your head, inspecting him.

“God, you look so stupid.” You sighed fondly.

“Jee, thanks.” Ray rolled his eyes and took the hat down, letting it dangle by the string from his neck.

“But it’ll keep you from getting cooked in the sun.” You remarked. “You fair-skinned princess.”

“I’m not a princess!” Ray argued, obviously playful, and the two of you burst into bright laughter.

He hated how easy it was to laugh with you right now.

The laughter dissolved off as you reached up - so gentle, so caring, running your fingers through Ray’s hair, pushing it out of his face. Your expression became so terribly haunted and hurt as you stared at his forehead - stared right at the spot where a bullet would burst through if he got his ticket, and your thumb brushed over the skin there. Like you were checking to see if this was still real - like you were checking to make sure that his brains were still inside of his skull.

Your throat let out a whimper again - the beginning of a cry, and before Ray could say anything, you turned around and picked up the bottle again, taking another heavy swig.

He had a terrible vision of you turning into your mother - sitting in a chair, clutching his picture in one hand and a bottle in the other. And he didn’t know if he could stop it, but he had to try.

“Y/N, stop.” He said, reaching out and trying to grab the bottle from you.

“What?” You gaped, your mouth dry from the liquid - ironic. You backed up, snatching yourself away from him, defensive. “You have to leave tomorrow. I might as well get shit faced.”

“Please. Don’t.”

With the intense pleading in his eyes, it was far too easy to let him take the bottle from you on his second try. He capped it and put it far back on the bench, like he was dismantling a bomb in uneasy movements that was still far too likely to explode.

“Here,” He said, reaching to his wrist and beginning to unbuckle his watch. “Take this.”

“Ray, I don’t want your dad’s-”

“Take it.” He insisted, reaching for your wrist and beginning to fasten it around. “You can count the moments until I come home.”

‘Or you can keep it safe if I die.’

You were both thinking it. Though you knew that you would give it back to Mrs. Garraty if he died. She deserved to have it more than you did.

“Cheesy asshole.” You muttered quietly, letting him fully secure it around your wrist before you pulled back.

“Can I ask you for something else?” Ray asked, his voice quiet, somehow nervous all of a sudden.

You wondered if you had any more good gear to give him. You wondered if, overzealously, he might want to have sex again.

“What?” You posed softly in return.

“Will you sleep with me?” He asked. “In my bed, I mean. I - I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep for shit tonight if you’re not there with me.”

It put a terrible ache in your chest.

It wouldn’t be the first time the two of you slept in the same bed together. It’s not like his mother or yours ever directly approved of inter-gender sleepovers, but the two of you never directly asked either. Sometimes you and Ray stayed up all night talking and ended up falling asleep in close proximity. Sometimes he fell asleep on your floor while you slept on the bed, promising every five minutes that he would ‘go home soon’. Sometimes the two of you made forts out of sheets and stayed in there all night together, bothering each other to stay awake and not sleeping a wink at all.

After your brother died, you said goodnight and went to your own house and then crawled into his bed after midnight every single night for over three months. Every single time, Ray didn’t question it. He just rubbed your back through the cries - he stayed quiet when you wanted, cuddled when you wanted, laid with his back to yours when you wanted. And sometimes, he talked with you about your brother - as though he were still a living, breathing person about to come home, when you wanted that too.

“Yeah.” You told him.

You knew that you had to tuck him into bed and get him sleeping soon to give him a better chance for the morning, but one more thing was bothering you. You shed off the horrible, cheesy shirt you had made, knowing that he was ultimately right about it. Not that you would ever say those words aloud. You ignored the way Ray’s eyes became glued to your bare breasts in the process, and you dug through the boxes once again, grabbing a shirt that had belonged to your father - a large, loose, comfortable flannel shirt. You did up your jeans properly and buttoned up the shirt, hating the way that Ray was looking at you - like you were beautiful, like you were perfect.

Like you were someone not worth leaving.

“Go.” You told him, giving him a gentle nudge toward the mouth of the shed.

Ray did a double take after he opened the door, but the military truck was long gone. It was a once nightly patrol to assure people of a military presence in the neighborhood, not a true constant surveillance to make sure that people never did anything wrong. The threat of that surveillance was most often enough to deter people from breaking the rules.

Ray then led you across back to his house, and when he opened the front door, his mother was quick to put out a cigarette she had been smoking down the sink, foolishly trying to wave the residual smoke out the open kitchen window.

“I - I was just waiting up for you.” She said, crossing her arms over her chest, trying not to seem caught.

You hated how red her eyes were - obviously she too had been crying over the idea of Ray going off to die.

You closed the door behind the two of you, signifying that you were staying instead of just seeing him in.

“Sorry I’m so late.” He told her. “Y/N was - she was just getting me some gear for tomorrow.”

He said, taking off the hat and putting it on a nearby coat hook, waving the evidence around so she wouldn’t further ask questions. Ginnie eyed the large bite mark on Ray’s neck, but said nothing about it.

“She’s letting me borrow her dad’s old boots.” Ray added on.

Ginnie looked shocked at this, knowing how protective you were over even the mention of your father. She stared at you with wide eyes as Ray unlaced the boots and kicked them off to the side.

“‘Borrow’ is the wrong word.” You told him, kicking off your own shoes and stepping around him. “I don’t want them back after your nasty, smelly feet have been in them for five or six days.”

“Six days?” Ray groaned as he stumbled into the house. Then, curiously, he asked: “What was the longest walk?”

He knew it sounded dumb, but he also knew that you would get his point.

“Seven days.” You said. “They went over 500 miles and ended up in New Hampshire. But they found out the winner was on Adderall after he had a heart attack a few hours after finishing - and that’s when they banned substances.”

“What’s Adderall?” Ray asked, having never heard of it before.

“Not important.” You sighed. “Time for bed.”

You shoved him toward the stairs, and he swerved around back toward his mom. He hugged her tightly, mumbling ‘goodnights’ and ‘I love you’s as she gave him a kiss on the cheek. You felt a strange pang of jealousy - seeing as the parent who had truly loved you was dead, the person who had taken care of you after that was dead, and your mother had never really been like that with you.

After a while, Ray hesitantly separated from his mother, and moved up the stairs with you following behind him. You heard a squeak as Ginnie tried to conceal her sobs, and you knew that her turning on the kitchen faucet was an attempt to hide the sound of her crying from Ray.

The moment he got into his bedroom, Ray stripped down into his underwear and fell into bed, kicking the unmade covers underneath him until he could tuck his feet in, not bothering to cover up all the way.

“Do you want some PJs?” He asked. “I still think I have something of yours from when-”

“I really don’t think I’m gonna sleep.” You said, moving to sit on the edge of the bed beside him, still fully dressed. Though, to fulfill his request, you did lay down beside him. He put a greedy arm around your waist, pulling you close while you stared up at the ceiling. “I just want you to sleep.”

Ray tucked his head into your neck, and after a few moments of slow, calm breathing, you were surprised when he spoke again.

“You wanna know why I signed up?”

“Please,” You sighed gently, too tired to take up another argument. “Don’t.”

“When my father died, it made me realize that we can’t go on with the world being the way it is.” Ray told you, his words quiet, careful, passionate. “This world just takes people from us. My father, your father, your brother. And I realized that in order to make this world safer for you, I need to change it.”

You swallowed around your tight throat, forcing yourself not to cry again. You reached out and squeezed his arm around your waist. You wanted to claw at him again, desperate to hold onto him.

“Yeah but - I don’t want them to take you too.”

Ray didn’t say anything else. He knew you were right. But it was too late now.

And surprisingly, in the terrible silence that followed - he was able to fall asleep.

…

When Ray’s mother ripped open the curtains of his bedroom the next morning, letting in those first warm bits of the early morning sunrise, you were gone. But he couldn’t be too surprised by that fact. He had to guess that you would rather run off to work then be there to see him off to what you thought had to be his certain death.

His mother was tearful and jumpier than usual, and the conversation between them was sparse. Of course, he couldn’t have guessed how she would react to something like this. She urged him to back out, and just like you, he had to remind her that the back-out date no longer applied to the morning of The Walk.

His fate was sealed now.

When she handed him the carefully wrapped handful of oatmeal raisin cookies that she had made during the night when she couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t help but to wish that he could share them with you.

…

He ended up sharing them with Pete, Hank, and Art.

It felt strange making friends on The Long Walk, but now Ray suddenly understood why your brother had spent so much of the broadcast smiling - so much of it laughing and joking with the people around him, even though they were all bound to die. There was an inherent brotherhood in that impending death, and it was all too easy to forget about it when the people beside you were telling stupid jokes. It was too easy to simply look forward and march.

Under the hot sun, it was nice to have the distraction of the current conversation at hand.

“No, true love is for assholes.” Hank sighed, shaking his head. “Only three things in life are for certain - a good meal, a good shit, and a good screw. The rest is all bullshit made up to sell romance novels to lonely old white ladies.”

“Don’t be so cynical, man.” Pete sighed, shaking his head.

“True love is real.” Art argued, giving a smile that made his words seem too easy to believe. “Soulmates are real. There is someone for everyone out there in the world.”

Hank’s face twisted, but with him looking forward with such intense determination, none of the other Musketeers saw the guilt streaking through his eyes.

“So what, you got a girl?” Pete asked Art, wondering why he was so determined on the topic.

“Nah.” Art shrugged. “Still haven’t met my special someone yet. But she’s out there. I know it.”

Ray wanted to point out that he would never meet that girl who was fated for him if he died on this desolate road, but he couldn’t bear to be the one to wipe that smile off Art’s face.

“What about you, Ray?” Pete asked, turning to the boy beside him. “You believe in true love?”

Ray had a stern frown etched deep onto his face under the shade of the wide brim of his hat. Shade that had only been provided thanks to you. He had come to realize quickly that you were right - it would have been so easy for his head to cook in the sun like an egg. Walking as a concept seemed so easy, but it was already so brutal out here.

“I think, for once, I’m more inclined to agree with Olson.” Ray said, nodding toward the shorter guy trailing ahead of them slightly. “True love is for assholes.”

Of course, he was thinking of you. He couldn’t stop thinking about the night before - you slapping him in the face, twice, and then wanting to have sex. Your taste on his tongue, your proclamation of regretting being in love with him, but you still giving him tips and gear that might help him win The Long Walk. You agreeing to lay down with him so that he slept better, and yet, sneaking away while he slept. It was all horrendous and confusing - and he was going to die with that horrible streak of pain in his chest, thinking about you.

He was an asshole who truly loved you.

“So you don’t got a girl?” Pete prodded, nudging an elbow gently into Ray’s side. “Nobody gonna be watin’ for you in Freeport aside from your Mom?”

“No, I don’t.” Ray said, hoping to shut the conversation down. “I definitely don’t have a girl.”

“Really?” Hank replied, his tone mocking. “Cause that giant fuckin’ hickey on your neck says otherwise.”

Ray’s eyes fell to his swiftly moving feet, shame easily readable on his whole body. In the lulling dread of the morning, he had forgotten about that. The obnoxious large mark was right on the edge of the shirt he was wearing, the fresh bite being irritated by the movement of his shirt as it shifted around while he walked. He didn’t think it was that noticeable, but apparently the harsh mark that was quickly blooming into a bright bruise on his fair skin was more than enough of an eyesore to interest the other guys, especially when the road was so desolate and the smallest bit of gossip intrigued them.

Pete had wanted to ask about it directly, but felt too polite to.

(It was why Hank had rushed to take off his wedding ring when the first dozen guys had reamed him out for being stupid enough to join The Walk while being married. It was why he was now loudly harping on true love not being real while thinking about his beautiful, beloved Clementine the whole time - the love he was racing to get back to.)

Ray reached to his neck, as if he could wipe the mark off, the other three laughed at the embarrassed expression on his face, Hank nearly doubling over with his joyous amusement and stumbling in front of them for a moment.

“Warning, Warning 46! First Warning!”

Ray grabbed him by the backpack and made sure he was stable on the road before he let go.

“Jesus, laugh your fuckin’ ass off, why don’t you?” He griped sarcastically.

Ray rolled his eyes. He truly didn’t think it was that funny.

“No, it’s just funny.” Hank replied, grinning over his shoulder at Ray. “You have an accident with the fuckin’ vacuum cleaner or somethin’? Since you’re so intent that you don’t got a girl.”

“You run into a vampire?” Art added on, smirking at him.

All three pairs of eyes looked at him expectantly, Pete biting his lip to avoid piling onto the jokes and making Ray feel worse. Ray hated that he couldn’t come up with a good lie.

“I had a girl.” Ray shrugged.

“There it is,” Hank said, pointing a finger at Ray accusingly.

“Ouch.” Art hissed, shaking his head.

“You have run across that which vexes all men,” Pete said, nodding understandingly, using his usual poetic wording.

“Money?” Hank posed, sounding genuinely confused. “The Long Walk?” He tried again.

“The inherent dichotomy of good and evil?” Art said, nodding contently as though this were the most obvious answer.

“A girl, idiots.” Stebbins chimed in harshly, shaking his head at their stupidity, causing them to realize that he had been listening the whole time. “The thing which vexes all men is women.”

The four boys stared back at him with tensely confused looks, and were only distracted away from this by another comment from the peanut gallery.

“Not if you’re a fuckin’ homo.” Barkovitch added on easily with a shrug. “They’re the only ones who don’t get pissed off by chasin’ women.”

“You know I’m starting to think that you’re the queer with the way you fuckin’ talk about it.” Ray told him with a sharp glare.

“Shut the fuck up!” He bit back. “You’re the one buddyin’ up with all these fuckin’ queers!”

He shook his head, glarin’ at them, and purposefully sped up ahead of them. At least it was nice to be rid of him for a while.

Pete sighed and shook his head.

“That is my point, though.” Pete told Ray.

“I’m not queer.” Ray replied, his voice drifting quiet. He had just explained that the hickey was from a girl. Did Pete not believe him?

“No,” Pete chuckled, smiling. “You’re vexed. By a woman.” He explained. “You seem real torn up about whatever happened with your girl.”

“She’s not my girl.” Ray sighed, putting his hands on his head in defeat, the words scraping the inside of his throat, grinding with a combination of regret and frustration. “Not anymore.” He added this last part quietly, stewing in all the horrible emotions.

“What happened?” Pete said, wrapping an arm gently around Ray’s shoulders, urging him on. “Come on, you can tell me.”

“Yeah, I’m bored.” Hank egged him on. “I wanna hear your little sob story.”

“You’re lucky I don’t have any rocks in my pocket.” Ray hissed at Hank, tearing out of Pete’s grip and moving toward Hank - until he was yanked back by Pete. Hank let out another chuckle.

“Be nice.” Art told them both with a smile. “We’re all friends, remember?”

There were a few more moments of nothing but the sounds of the loud grinding treads on the tanks and their footsteps heavy on the pavement. When Ray looked over at Pete, he saw nothing but honesty and understanding in that smile. He might as well die with the weight lifted off his soul. Hell, if Pete won and Ray didn’t - maybe he could find you and tell you that he still loved you after all.

“She lived next door to me for years and she was my best friend in the whole world,” Ray began, finding the words easier after he started.

“And now I have taken on that title, of course.” Pete grinned at him.

Ray let out an easy laugh and rolled his eyes, and Pete let out a laugh in return.

“And when she found out I was doing The Walk, she went nuts.” Ray explained.

He wasn’t sure why - but he had expected you to take it better. Perhaps it was because you had seen your brother off with a hug and a few tears in your eyes. But you had cheered him on, so sure that he would win. Why didn’t you believe in Ray that same way?

“What the fuck did you expect?” Hank replied. “Girls aren’t usually turned on by the whole death march thing.”

“Sometimes they are.” Ray shrugged.

“Oh, so she really gave you somethin’ to remember.” Pete reasoned, wiggling his brows in a way that made Ray look to the ground once again as his face flushed with embarrassment. “But why don’t you think she’ll be waitin’ for you in Freeport?”

“I fucked it all up.” Ray reasoned, purposefully being vague.

He couldn’t tell them about his plans to kill The Major. He wasn’t sure if he would at all. He might not even tell Pete, who seemed perfectly trustworthy and able to keep the secret. Pete might even help him if asked.

“It seemed like a pity fuck, more than anything.” Ray continued. “She thinks I’m gonna die out here. She doesn’t actually think I can win. She’s probably not gonna be in Freeport because she doesn’t think I’m gonna make it there.”

Stebbins let out a snort of laughter, and Ray really wished he had picked up some rocks before they started. It would have been so worth getting a warning to see the guy sporting a black eye.

“You never know.” Pete told him, a shine of loving hope in his eyes. “She probably loves you more than you think. She’s probably just afraid to see you die, is all.”

“Nah.” Ray said, shaking his head. “She hates my fuckin’ guts.”

…

When the sun started to set, Ray swore he saw you. Standing just off the road, under a tree - he swore he saw you past one of the tanks, past the crowd of heads. He swore he saw you, just standing there.

And when he got a good, proper look at you, locked eyes with you, nearly crying at the sight of your face in the evening light. He blinked, tried to clear his eyes, squinting his eyes past the bright orange power of the setting sun - and then you were gone.

“You good, Ray?” Pete asked, noticing the entirely spooked look on his friend’s face.

“Yeah.” Ray lied. “Yeah, I’m good, Pete.”

…

Ray didn’t even realize he had fallen asleep. He didn’t even know it was possible to fall asleep - standing up, walking, keeping pace.

All he knew was that his mind was locked onto you like a hot target now, and he couldn’t stop thinking about you. He couldn’t stop remembering, couldn’t stop regretting.

His mind went back to a night a few months after your brother had died, when you were both sixteen.

The sweet summer air was pouring in through your open bedroom window while Ray lounged on your bed while you were sitting on a chair in front of your small desk, working on something.

He was looking at the loose pages of an old, discontinued beauty magazine that you had spread out there. One of the girls from school had gotten the magazine from someone in the city and sold off the pages, and though it was banned material, you had traded her cigarettes for some of them. At first, it was purely out of interest, and now - you were actually putting it to use.

Ray had thought about taking the pages from you and burning them or destroying them. He hated the idea of you getting caught with something banned, but he hoped at the very least, you were smart enough to hide them or shell them off to someone else when you were done with them.

“What do you think?” You asked, turning to Ray from the small mirror you had nailed to the wall in front of your desk, creating a makeshift vanity.

His stomach caught in his throat. You looked good but you looked so… different. You had just finished applying a mixture of vaseline and red Kool-Aid with a cotton swab, making your own makeshift red lipstick as the magazine had instructed. And your eyes were lined with a thick, black outline that swept into a large wing at the side. You were holding that page, so he had no clue what it was made out of.

The closest he had come to seeing you like this before was when you sucked on popsicles, leaving a messy, bright red ring around your lips, or when you sucked on your cinnamon rockets to make them last longer and they stained your mouth. But this was so well done - this was so intentional. He rolled more onto his stomach on your bed to hide the evidence of exactly what this was doing to him, hating how the attraction battled with the deep worry for you that he felt in his gut. He hated the idea of you being mistaken for a working girl and being arrested if you were caught out looking like that.

“You should take it off.” He told you, his voice coming out in a strained grunt. “Your mom won’t like it.”

You let out a laugh - not one jolly or genuinely amused, but a more sad, tortured laugh.

“My mom doesn’t give a shit about anything anymore.” You told him, moving toward the bed and sitting on the edge on the opposite side, tossing down the page you were holding among the messy pile. “All she does is watch that tape of my brother. She wouldn’t care if I ran around outside naked unless it messed with what was happening on that stupid TV.”

Then it clicked - Ray immediately knew what all this was about.

Since your brother’s death, your mother acted like she didn’t have any family left at all. She acted as if her only child had died. And while you claimed that you understood her grief, it was always a sentiment delivered with harsh words such as ‘I can’t blame her, the good one is gone’. You didn’t think you were good enough to be missed.

And now you were trying to prove it. Playing into the idea that you were ‘the bad child’ while simultaneously flailing in the net, desperately screaming out for attention without even realizing it.

Ray should have told you that he loved you. He should have told you how good you were. He should have tried harder.

“Is this really what guys want from girls? Huge tits with their ribs sticking out?”

You picked up one of the pages, showing off a cartoonish, hand-drawing image of a woman with ample cleavage and a concave stomach, bent into an odd position to show off these ‘curves’.

Ray wanted to deliver the sentiment that - no, not all guys wanted that. But he chose something else instead.

“Guys want girls who are respectable.” He said, tearing the page out of your hand and putting it down, trying another effort to get you to take the make-up off.

You let out another horrible, dry laugh.

“No, guys want whores. Guys like whores.” You replied, shaking your head.

This made his stomach clench even more. What were you planning on doing?

“I just never understood the idea of wanting to fuck someone who’s basically a bag of bones with tits.” You said, getting off the bed and going over to your closet. With the door open and blocking Ray from seeing you, you began to change. “I mean maybe it’s just me, but if you like big tits, wouldn’t that mean you like big girls in general?”

“I guess.” Ray sighed, mentally tuned out from the conversation, too fixated on wondering what you were changing into when the dress you were wearing had been perfectly fine.

“I never really understood wanting to fuck skinny people in general. Why would you want to cuddle up next to someone so bony? Maybe I’m just weird, but I like the idea of someone bigger - more cuddly, more to grab onto.”

Your words didn’t even register in Ray’s mind at the time, because you shut the closet door then, revealing your new outfit.

You were tying the halter neck of a dress he had never seen you wearing before. But he recognized the fabric as being from one of your old dresses, now butchered up. That was why you had asked to borrow his mother’s sewing machine a week ago. It was short - the flowy skirt barely covering your ass, with a plunging back, and a bow behind your neck that led down into a V-neckline that revealed far too much of your chest for his liking.

(Well - it’s not that he didn’t like looking at your chest. It’s just that - god, were you planning on going out in public wearing that? Were you planning on letting other people see you like that?)

“How do I look?” You prompted, turning to him and striking a pose.

A bunch of words battled in his throat, and luckily, nicer ones were what found their way out.

“You look beautiful.” He said firmly. “But-”

“Ugh, don’t.” You sighed, rolling your eyes. “I don’t have time for Helicopter Ray right now.”

It was what you called him when you accused him of ‘hovering’ over you. Times when he told you that climbing too high in trees was a bad idea, when he didn’t want you starting fights, when warned you not to poke a literal hornet’s nest because you had never seen one before and you got way too curious about it. (That one had ended badly for the both of you).

You grabbed a pair of shoes from your wardrobe - a pair with small heels that he had never seen before, and you opened the window and tossed them out. He wondered why you felt the need to sneak out the window if you claimed that your mother didn’t care.

(Truthfully, you were avoiding catching even a glimpse of your mother on the living room TV.)

“Where are you going?” He demanded, pushing up off the bed (lucky that his lower half had calmed down now), putting himself between you and the open window, receiving a glare for this. “It’s almost curfew-”

“I’ll wait for the stupid truck to pass by.” You shrugged, trying to force Ray out of your way, receiving firm hands on your shoulders for this.

“Where are you going?” He demanded again, his voice tighter, staving off anger and frustration.

He had tried being patient with you since your brother’s death. He had been soft, and sweet. He had put away ‘Helicopter Ray’ for so long, but now… he just couldn’t. He was too worried about you now.

“I’m going to meet Bobby Dagen.” You told him, trying to speak quietly in the hopes that he wouldn’t hear you.

“Oh my god!” Ray cried out, turning toward the wall, his whole body folding in shock. “The world’s biggest asshole? The guy you once made eat his own hair because he called you ugly?”

He turned back to you, his entire face painted with shock, praying that you would tell him it was a big joke.

“I don’t think he actually swallowed.” You shrugged. “He asked me out - I was bored, so I said yes.”

Ray felt a vein in his temple throbbing particularly hard. He wanted to yell about how he could have come up with a million things to solve your boredom. He wanted to demand to know if you were doing this just to bother him. Instead, his tongue landed on something else.

“So, what the hell are you two gonna do on this fabulous date?” He asked, sarcasm ripping through his voice.

You rolled your eyes.

“He’s gonna take me in his truck for a drive.” You said. “He told me he’d drive me up to that big tree where they used to hang the thieving miners in the 1800s. You know I like creepy old stuff,”

You had asked Ray to take you to the old Hanging Tree dozens of times since you had moved to town, claiming that it was one of the only interesting things in the old town. And he had refused because it creeped him out. And now that tree would be even more mentally scarring for him because it would force him to imagine you and stupid Bobby Dagen sitting in his truck underneath it, with his dumb, stupid, sloppy lips all over your face, his hands all over you-

You moved toward the window again, and he grabbed you by the arm again.

“You know your brother would never approve of you going out with that slimeball.” He said, trying one last ditch effort to appeal to you, trying to get to that soft spot he always knew you had that nobody else believed in.

At this time, these words were the exact wrong ones. The mention of your brother made you develop a harder shell than ever. It made you blow out your spikes like a puffer fish, trying to protect yourself. You gave Ray a harsh glare.

“Well, my brother isn’t here right now to stop me.” You said. He could see the intense pain in your eyes - the fact that you hated that nobody was around to take care of you now. “Besides - he believed in killing with kindness, right?” You gave a sharp smirk, throwing those words back in a terrible way.

Before Ray could stop you, you stepped out onto the roof and descended down via the gutter with shocking skill. He wasn’t as light-footed as you and didn’t want to make an idiot of himself by falling, so he had to watch on with intense annoyance as you picked up your shoes off the ground and blew him a kiss.

“Don’t wait up!” You called out, running off with a giggle.

Ray felt stomach sick.

He paced back and forth in your room, watching as the patrol truck passed, thinking about what he should do. He knew it would be rude to go out there and get you. It would be rude, right? You wanted to be on this date. But you were out past curfew, and if you were caught, you would be ticketed. Or worse - arrested. Especially dressed like that…

What if Bobby tried something with you? What if you couldn’t stop him?

A voice in Ray’s head laughed. You of all people didn’t need protecting.

Oh god, what if you killed Bobby?

Ray thought back to a conversation he had with your brother before he left for The Walk.

“Take care of her while I’m gone.”

“Of course. You don’t even have to ask.”

“And Ray - if I don’t come back-”

“Don’t even say that, man.”

“But if I don’t-”

“You know I’ll always have her. I’ll always take care of her. You don’t have to worry. Just focus on The Walk, man. You got it. You’ll be home in no time.”

At the time, he had genuinely thought about the possibility that your brother might not come home. He had just been trying to reassure him because he was about to embark on something so dangerous. He had made the promise with his whole heart - knowing that he would take care of you because he loved you.

He had to be the one taking care of you now.

And that meant sneaking past your mother and out the side door, on his way to trek toward that stupid haunted tree that he hated so much.

He hated that he loved the feeling of Bobby’s teeth crunching under his knuckles so much. And he also hated that you didn’t speak to him for a whole day afterwards.

That was when you started sneaking out instead of just telling him where you were going. Ray wasn’t sure what he regretted more: pissing you off by disrupting your date, or not being the one to ask you out first.

“Warning, Warning 47! First Warning!”

Ray was jolted from his sleep by that horrible sound, and immediately greeted with the feeling of Pete tugging on his backpack, keeping him on track.

“Was I asleep?” He mumbled stupidly, rubbing his eyes.

“Yeah.” Pete said. “Your mind usin’ the old escape hatch. Ain’t that amazin’? You can fall asleep while walkin’.”

“It’s fuckin’ bizarre.” Ray replied.

“What were you dreamin’ about?” Pete asked, giving Ray a smile that was far too warm for the chill of the now very dark night around them, the sun long chased away and seeming like it would never return.

Ray felt a twist inside of him, like a knife being driven through his insides. Oddly enough, even knowing that he might never see you again, he felt protective of you. He felt protective of your memory - like you were a ghost following him on this paved road and if he spoke your name too loudly, if he spoke it at all, then you would disappear like smoke and any last trace of you would certainly be gone.

“Your girl?” Pete said, nudging his side gently.

Maybe Pete felt that ghost too.

“Yeah.” Ray admitted, too tired to come up with a good lie.

“Thought you said she wasn’t your girl,” Hank piped up, trailing behind Ray.

Ray had almost forgotten the others were there - his hazy mind so focused on Pete.

He glared at Hank, who let out a laugh.

“What’s her name?” Pete asked.

Ray was hesitant, and swallowed around his dry tongue.

“Y/N.” He told Pete.

“Beautiful name.” Pete complimented easily, giving another warm smile.

“Is she hot?” Hank asked.

“Shut up.” Ray said, rolling his eyes.

“Come on, it’s a question-” Pearson spoke up, now suddenly behind him too. “Does she have big tits? Small tits? Is she ugly? Is that why you don’t wanna tell us?”

“I’m gonna punch you right in your face,” Ray grunted, turning toward Pearson.

“Did you bring a picture?” Hank grinned.

“Obviously, any girl who fucked Garraty isn’t gonna be pretty.” Stebbins said, loudly joining the conversation. “Have any of you seen the girls in hicktown, Maine-?”

“Shut up!” Ray cried out. “She’s not ugly!”

‘She’s the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen.’ Ray swallowed the words, knowing it would be too cheesy.

“Yeah come on, lay off.” Pete said, giving the others a harsh look. “I’m sure she’s real pretty.”

The words sounded too warm and genuine coming from Pete, and oddly, Ray couldn’t bring himself to be jealous. He wasn’t jealous at all - not even knowing that Pete was thinking of you, trying to conjure up some mental image of what you might be like.

If he could guarantee that Pete was the only one listening, Ray would have described you to him. He would have told him how gorgeous you were; how you had a beautiful face, a perfect body - but not one ‘perfect’ like in that stupid magazine, one that was perfect, and real, and so easy to hold. So warm. He would tell Pete how you were fiery, how you never let him get away with anything, how you struck fear into the heart of every guy who knew you and how much that turned him on. How perfectly your wet cunt clenched around his cock -

“It’s not like she’s gonna be in Freeport for any of us to see.” Stebbins chuckled.

“It’s not like any of you sad-sacks are gonna make it to Freeport anyway.” Ray said, glaring at him.

Ray wouldn’t make it there either. He knew he wasn’t going to last.

But as he stared ahead into the darkness, he tried to focus on your face. He tried to remember what your laugh sounded like. He tried to think of things that would make you smile - make a list in his mind so that he wouldn’t think about how dead he was on his feet.

Cinnamon rockets. Petting other people’s dogs. Climbing trees. Constellations that have funny names. Snails that make a trail of poop behind them. Creepy stories with a funny ending. The last cigarette out of the pack. The way Ray’s cheeks get red when he laughs too hard. Licking the spoon when his mom makes a big batch of cookies.

A gunshot went off behind him, and Ray reached out for Pete’s hand. Pete squeezed his grip tightly back.

He would like to think that if you ever got to meet Pete, Ray would get to add him to that list.

…

The first night was deceivingly easy.

He marched through, and at times, upon Pete’s insistence, even leaned on him to indulge in some of that bizarre, walking sleep once again.

The second day, everyone was quieter. The dread had truly set in.

It seemed like a blink and then the sun was setting again.

The second night was hell.

All too soon, Ray realized it was designed that way. Lure everyone into a false sense of security - trick them into thinking the entirety of The Long Walk would just be a war between them and their own mind. And then catch them off guard.

Stebbins was right when he said a lot of them were going to die on the hill - a lot of them did. It went from damn near calm to a parade of gunfire in a single breath and Ray found himself racing, running from it. He regretted what he said to Pete, but maybe that’s just the kind of guy he was - someone who let his mouth operate on a fuse, someone who couldn’t control the knee-jerk fear, especially not when it had a carbine pointed at his back.

But still, like you - Pete forgave him too easily.

Pete held him until morning. When his eyes blinked open, the back of his shirt was still damp from the canteen he had dumped over his head. Or maybe it was from the sweat. A deadly combination - sweating so much from the constant walking and letting the chill of the night get to you. He had heard of guys who developed pneumonia from it in past years - skinny guys who weren’t so healthy anyway. And they collapsed on The Walk, coughing and sick.

Stebbins had been coughing and he didn’t look so good, but he claimed it was just allergies.

In the back of his mind, Ray still remembered what your brother had looked like near the end - his face turning inhuman colours, choking to get a single breath. He shuddered at the thought. He had been intensely careful not to trip, looking out for potential dangers on the ground. He was sad that it was a lesson he had to learn from a dead man that he had once called a friend.

The sun was barely coming up over the horizon and there was no warmth to be had from it yet. Ray gave a vicious shiver, wiggling the hand down by his side, the one that wasn’t draped over Pete’s shoulder, hating how numb his fingers felt.

“It’s fuckin’ cold.” Ray said quietly, stretching his neck, trying to better wake up.

“You’ll be alright.” Pete told him, giving his side a squeeze with the arm he had slid under Ray’s backpack to support him. “I’ll keep you warm.”

Ray gave a soft smile - one that was soon dampened when he heard it again. That stupid fucking voice.

“You made it through the night, boys!” The Major announced, cheering them on proudly. “Making it through that hill takes some real sac. We’re almost at the 100 Mile Marker now! There is a sure winner among you - now let’s just weed him out!”

Nobody cheered. They were all tired. They were all worn down.

“Warning, Warning 49! Second Warning!”

Ray glanced back. Harkness was limping - Ray couldn’t see it past Baker’s height, but he was dragging a mangled mess of a leg with him.

“My ankle! My ankle’s all twisted up.” Harkness cried out, slowing drastically as he sobbed.

“Don’t look.” Pete huffed at him, tugging on the arm around his shoulder, jerking his attention back to the front. “You don’t have to look.”

“My ankle!” Harkness cried out again.

“Warning, Warning 49! Final Warning!”

Ray expected the gunshot. He hated that he was becoming used to it by now.

What he did not expect was for the shot to fire off in front of them.

He didn’t expect The Major’s body to drop like a bag of rocks, some blood splattering on him and Pete where they were at the front of the pack.

He did not expect Harkness’s cries to continue.

“What the fuck?”

“Did you see that?”

“Is this real?”

“What the fuck is happening?”

“Get down!”

Pete yelled those last words, and somehow had the good instinct to drag Ray down to the ground with him. Ray’s stomach twisted up at the idea of quitting walking, his whole body screaming that quitting now and stilling was a sentence of certain death. But he was too tired and too shocked to fight it, and soon his stomach hit the pavement as more gunshots rang out.

Nobody was given any warnings.

He expected it to be called out: Warning 47, First Warning - but it never came. He hugged the pavement with his hands over his head, with Pete protectively laying on top of his back, noise and chaos all around them. Panicked breaths flowed through his lips as gunshot after gunshot rang out, and that mechanical voice never came.

It was a few moments of loud, intense chaos, and then - silence. Well - Harkness was still crying, and though none of the vehicles in the motorcade were moving anymore, the motors were still chugging quietly as they ran, consuming fuel. And everyone was letting out those same panicked breaths - wait, breathing?

There were still people alive.

Pete was the first one to move and Ray was barely able to push himself off the ground, leaning up onto his hands and knees, shaking so harshly.

“Get off the fucking pavement, Garraty.”

That voice. That voice.

No - no fucking way.

...

I would like to see this get 20 Reblogs and 15 Comments before I post the next part.

This is based on the number of notes that the preview moodboard got, and I hope that I'm not being overeager or overshooting. I would really like to encourage people to engage with the fic - that's the general purpose of this goal.

Keep in mind, I do always keep my inbox open, and I do always keep anon turned on for people that are shy, and I encourage comments there if you don't want to make a discussion in the comments of this post, I would love to hear about your thoughts in my inbox as well. And if you feel like reblogging without making any comments and just being silent, that is awesome too!

I am so, so, so excited to be posting my first long fic for this fandom, and I hope that I will be posting many more in the future. These characters are so inspiring, and I could write so much about them. I love them all so much.

Happy Reading,

Sunny ☀️

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There Was Once A Knight in Shining Armor...He Died